On October 22–23, 2026, Google Ads announced three updates to Shopping, Search, and Performance Max campaigns tied to "customer lifecycle goals." This is confirmed by Search Engine Roundtable, Search Engine Land, and Google's own advertiser blog, which directly titles the piece "three updates to help you win the holiday season." The three changes: High Value Mode, previously limited to Search and PMax, is now rolling out to Shopping; customer retention modes (Re-engagement and Retention Only) have been extended to more campaign types; and percentage bid multipliers have left beta for Search, Shopping, PMax, and Demand Gen — in both Google Ads and SA360.
Why Google is changing its bidding logic right now
Before this update, High Value Mode — an algorithm that hunts for "your next best new customer" by weighing not just purchase likelihood but a buyer's probable long-term value — worked in Search and Performance Max, but not in Shopping, where most retail purchases actually happen. Now the algorithm can see the whole customer journey inside product listings. Then there are the retention modes: Re-engagement Mode keeps showing ads to everyone but prioritizes people who haven't ordered in a while; Retention Only Mode is a campaign dedicated exclusively to existing customer segments, with no hunt for new ones. The third change — percentage bid multipliers — sounds technical but solves a concrete problem: previously, a bid adjustment was a flat amount regardless of basket size, so a jewelry store overpaid on cheap items and underpaid on expensive ones. A 20% multiplier (1.2x) now scales for both a €50 basket and a €500 one.
Where the trap sits for the smaller advertiser
All three features are flagged as rolling out "this month" — meaning no fixed date and no guarantee they're already visible in any given account. That creates a gap: large agencies with a dedicated PPC specialist hear about new modes through newsletters and switch on High Value Mode for Shopping ahead of the holidays; the owner of a small online store who set up campaigns six months ago and hasn't touched them since might spend all of December on the old bidding rules without ever knowing the option exists. There's also a detail being discussed in the comments on the news: even in Retention Only Mode, ads can still show to people beyond the intended target — because of limits on personal-data processing, Google doesn't always have signals precise enough to tell a "returning" customer from a new one with full certainty.
Picture a concrete example: a small cosmetics shop in Porto sells to both one-off buyers and subscription-refill customers. Before the update, the owner ran a single Shopping campaign for everyone, and the budget got diluted between people who buy once and people who come back a month later. By turning on Retention Only Mode for the repeat-customer base and High Value Mode to attract new customers with high basket potential, the same budget can now be split across two different bidding logics instead of one blended average — and, in theory, produce a more predictable outcome heading into Christmas. But that's exactly the catch: it's theory. Google doesn't publish an improvement percentage; it only promises more "precise" budget spend, not a concrete ROAS figure.
Worth saying plainly: any expansion of Google Ads' automated bidding modes reduces the advertiser's manual control over exactly who sees an ad. The more decisions handed to the algorithm, the harder it becomes to explain to a client why a campaign worked or didn't in a given month — and that explanation will be exactly what's needed right after the holiday season, once final profitability gets tallied up.
At Dayava, we set up clients' ad accounts so that new Google and Meta features get switched on deliberately and on schedule, rather than discovered by accident three months after launch — it's precisely these small technical lags that usually eat into budget right before the holidays.
If you want your ad campaigns set up correctly and on time for the holiday season — leave a request at dayava.pt/contactos/.