How does Google Ads give you control over your ads?
Short answer
Google Ads lets you set your budget and bid strategy, choose where and when ads show, decide which searches to include or exclude, and supply the ads themselves. You can change these settings at campaign level whenever you need.
The main controls
- Budget: you set an average daily budget. Google may spend up to twice that on a given day, but no more than 30.4 times it over a month.
- Bidding: choose a strategy such as Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximise conversions or Maximise conversion value.
- Search terms: keywords decide where Search ads can show, and negative keywords exclude terms you do not want.
- Timing: ad scheduling limits ads to certain hours or days and can raise or lower bids for those times.
Control in App campaigns
- You do not pick keywords or build individual ads.
- You supply text, images and videos, a starting bid, a budget, languages and locations.
- Google tests asset combinations across Search, Google Play, YouTube, Display and Discover.
- You choose the bid strategy: target cost per install, target cost per action, Maximise conversions, Maximise conversion value or Target ROAS.
In practice
For app marketers, the real levers are the optimisation event, the bid target, the budget and the quality of your assets. Feed the campaign reliable conversion data from Firebase or your mobile measurement partner, change one lever at a time, and give each change time to settle before you judge it.
See how we run App campaigns on our Google Ads agency page.
Sources checked 4 October 2026
Related Google Ads questions
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- Why is Google Ads a viable option?
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