Holistic or Growth? What I'd uncheck first

Primary source: Google Ads Help: About Recommended Investment Strategy (no publish date on page)

If you've managed Google Ads for any length of time, you know the budget card. "Your campaign is limited by budget." Sometimes it's right, and it's always easy to ignore. The Investment Strategy tab is the bigger version of that card, and Google's latest update gave it two modes.

That's the part I want to slow down on.

Where to find it and what changed

Go to Campaigns, then Recommendations, then the Investment Strategy tab. It works at the account level, one account at a time. If you plan across an MCC, that still happens in Performance Planner.

There are two modes now. In Google's words:

• Holistic "reallocates existing budget from campaigns that are underutilized or have lower efficiency to your highest-performing campaigns, and also allocates your additional weekly spend."
• Growth "strictly adds new budget to constrained campaigns ... without any reduction on any of your existing campaigns' budgets."

Holistic carries the "Recommended" label. Growth doesn't. So the view Google points you to first is the one that can cut.

I don't think Holistic is a bad idea. It's answering a fair question: if you won't add much budget, where should the budget you already have go? Agencies ask that every month. My issue is that Google doesn't define how it picks the campaigns that lose. Each row gets a short "Recommendation insights" note, but the help page never says what counts as "underutilized."

How the math works

You pick a goal: Clicks, Conversions, or Conversion value. Then you tell it how much to grow, either as additional weekly spend or as a weekly increase in your goal, like "50 more conversions."

The table under it shows each campaign's new budget (and in Holistic, whether that budget goes up or down), any recommended Target CPA or Target ROAS change, the estimated weekly impact, and Google's Recommendation insights.

Keep the seven days in mind. Google's own comparison puts it plainly: Investment Strategy gives you a 7-day forecast with one-click apply, and Performance Planner gives you forecasts up to 18 months out that include seasonality. Google says the 7-day forecast accounts for recent performance trends and conversion delays. It doesn't mention seasonality. A week of recent trends can't see Black Friday coming, and that's the week that pays for the quarter.

The bigger gap is what the help page leaves out. Google doesn't say how it decides a campaign is "underutilized" or has "lower efficiency." It doesn't say whether that's measured on the conversion action you picked, on last-click, or on something else. Until Google spells it out, I'd treat every "decrease" row as a question to check.

The campaigns Holistic can quietly underfund

The line on the help page I'd pay most attention to: eligible campaigns are selected by default. You can uncheck any of them, and unchecked campaigns keep their current budget and bid strategy. The page doesn't say whether brand campaigns, holdouts, or campaigns still learning get any special treatment, so I'd assume they don't.

These are the ones I'd check first.

• Brand. Brand campaigns often can't spend their full budget because there are only so many people searching your name. A tool hunting for unused budget could read that as "underutilized." I wouldn't let a 7-day forecast decide how much of your brand traffic you're willing to give away.
• Geo holdouts and tests. Their whole job is to stay different from the rest of the account. Move budget into or out of them and the test is over.
• Campaigns still in learning. A week of data is the reason they look weak. Pulling budget now makes it harder for them to ever look strong.
• Campaigns built around a different conversion action. If you set the goal to Conversions and a campaign is optimizing toward a conversion action that isn't your real business goal, the tool compares it on a goal it was never trying to hit.

The tool gives you filters for Conversion action, Campaign type, and Location. Use them. Filtering by conversion action is the fastest way to see whether you're comparing apples to apples before anything moves.

Watch the bundled target change

This part is easy to miss. If you apply a suggested Target CPA or Target ROAS change in the tool, the campaign's bid target updates along with the new budget. Apply all takes you to a confirmation summary, and Confirm updates campaigns "instantly."

That's two changes in one click. Three weeks from now, when conversions are up or down, you won't be able to tell whether the budget did it or the target did. I'd rather apply the budget first, let it run, and make the target decision on its own later. If the target change is a good idea today, it'll still be a good idea in two weeks.

How I'd run it, step by step

When Performance Planner is the better tool

Investment Strategy is built for quick, one-click budget moves inside a single account. If you need seasonality, a longer horizon, or a plan across several accounts in an MCC, use Performance Planner. For holiday budgets, that's most of us right now.

What I'd still like Google to answer

Google's help page doesn't give any accuracy data for the 7-day forecasts, so the only check you have is comparing the forecast with what your account does afterward. A few other open questions:

• How "underutilized" and "lower efficiency" are calculated.
• Whether Holistic would cut a brand campaign, holdout, or learning campaign if you leave it checked.
• Whether these changes show up in change history as recommendation applies.
• Whether auto-apply can trigger them. If you have auto-apply on for budget recommendations, now is a good time to look at that setting again.

Do this before your next Apply all