Google Ads API v26.1 adds budget controls and eligibility checks

What changed

Campaign-budget additions support channel priority tiers and caps on the share spent by secondary-tier channels. Account-level defaults and a budget-eligibility field accompany those controls. Other additions include external promotion-redemption information, a Local Services eligibility check tied to a customer and Google Business Profile listing, and household-income exclusions for Performance Max.

Reporting changes include additional reach-frequency buckets and support for selected impression-share and click-share metrics alongside hotel and vertical-ad segments. These are API capabilities; their presence does not establish that every underlying advertising feature is available to every account.

For teams maintaining integrations, review the fields relevant to existing workflows, inspect eligibility responses and test the intended requests before changing production automation. This release is distinct from v26’s 14 October breaking changes and earlier announcements of channel controls in the Google Ads interface.

Google’s release notes are unsigned. Barry Schwartz’s dated report is retained as reporting credit, rather than attribution as the release’s author. The image is an extract of the official v26.1 documentation.

For operational review, separate read-only reporting changes from settings that can alter delivery. Reading eligibility or adding a reporting segment is a different decision from changing priority tiers or excluding an income range. Confirm the intended account and campaign scope, record the previous configuration and compare results after an approved change. A minor version’s lack of breaking changes does not remove the need to test how newly adopted fields interact with an integration’s existing defaults.