What’s new with Google’s Search Ads 360

Lizzie Powell
Managing Director, Design & Technology UK

Length

10 min read

Date

29 April 2022

Search Ads 360 (SA360) plays an important role in managing SEA advertising campaigns. The platform helps agencies and marketers to efficiently manage some of the largest search marketing campaigns in the world, across multiple engines and media channels.

As of February 2022, SA360 has been revamped with an updated UI, bolstered enterprise features such as Performance Centre, cross search engines feature adoption, support for new campaigns like Performance Max and Discovery Campaigns, and full integration with Google Analytics 4 properties, which were previously only available in GA360 enterprise version.

In this article we will cover all major updates you need to be aware of, and how you can make the best use of the platform to achieve optimal added value.

Where does SA360 fit in the GMP stack?

Since SA360 is part of the Google Marketing Platform (GMP), the entire digital performance (i.e. all running campaigns), can be viewed from one system. This also includes Display & Video 360, and all well-known social accounts.

As a crucial part of GMP, SA360 unifies search campaigns across multiple engines and media channels. The integration with Google Marketing Platform allows for easy campaign management, cross-channel buying, tracking, reporting and attribution across a single platform.

Unlike Google Ads, SA360 can be optimised for multiple conversions from different sources under different target values within a bid strategy. A unique form of bid strategy not found in Google Ads is Budget Bid Strategies (BBS).

What’s new in SA360?

User Interface

The “Overview” page in the new Search Ads 360 experience can quickly give you a sense of the overall performance of your account, or of individual campaigns or ad groups. The new Search Ads 360 offers more functionality throughout the account hierarchy to streamline your workflow.

The new Search Ads 360 navigation menu at the top of the page displays your account hierarchy in breadcrumbs, so you can know where you are at all times. For example, the first row of the navigation menu displays the new account names – Manager > Sub-manager > Client – to show you where you are in the account hierarchy.

When scoped into a client account, the second row of the navigation menu displays – All campaigns > Campaign > Ad Group – to give you a clear picture of where you are in the hierarchy.

UI Terminology

Terminology has changed and manager accounts now have nearly identical functionality as your sub-manager accounts.

The below changes have been implemented:

Previous SA360 = New SA360

Agency Accounts = Manager Accounts
Advertiser Accounts = Sub-Manager Accounts
Engine Accounts = Client Accounts
Engine (segmentation) = Account Type (segmentation)
Account Name (segmentation) = Account (segmentation)
Business Data = Customisation Dimensions
Formula Columns = Custom Columns
Budget Management = Performance Center
Rules + Scheduled Edits = Rules

Measurement & Reporting

Budget Management changes to Performance Center

Budget management has been redesigned from the ground up and is now called Performance Center. To help you seamlessly manage spend and understand your campaigns’ success more clearly, Performance Center gives you the ability to do things like:

Multiple campaign budget management.
Create campaign groups to monitor performance in an aggregated way.
Create performance plans for optimal budget distribution and managing campaign performance.

Report Editor tool
The new Search Ads 360 experience offers a robust reporting experience with a Reports page (formerly Dimensions), to help you view, manage, and analyse data at Manager, Sub-Manager and Advertiser level. You’ll find new predefined reports, or you can create your own custom reports.

Upgrade to All Conversions
The All Conversions (“All conv.”) column now lets you track all your conversions including Floodlight activities, Google Analytics conversions, and Google Ads conversion actions.

Choose data to include in Conversions
Use the Conversions column in the new Search Ads 360 to track only conversion actions that are included for bid strategies. You can also choose which data to include by modifying the Default Conversion Goal in the previous Search Ads 360.

Once your bid strategies have been migrated to the new experience, you can use the Include in Conversions setting. Sub-manager accounts that have not migrated auto-bidding strategies will show ‘0’ in the conversions column.

View only Google Ads conversions
You can see the number of conversions measured by Google Ads conversion tracking in the Google Ads Conversions column. It also includes other conversions shared with Google Ads for your auto-bidding strategies.

Custom Conversions is migrated from Google Ads to SA360 and it changes name to Custom columns
With the new Search Ads 360 experience any custom conversion columns and Floodlight columns can be found under the Custom Columns section. They can be created, edited, and removed by clicking the Columns icon above most tables, then opening the Custom Columns section.

Google Analytics 4 integration
Search Ads 360 is now fully integrated with Google Analytics 4 properties. This was previously only available in GA360 (Enterprise), and is now available in the standard, free version of GA4 for everyone.

Features and benefits include:

GA4 will export Audiences & Conversions to SA360.
Auto-tagging for campaign attribution.
Import Cost Data from SA360 into GA4.
App and site engagement metrics are available in Search Ads 360 reports.

Multi-Search Engine Advertising Integration

Search SA360 is a one-stop management solution for search campaigns on Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu and other search engines. SA360 offers multi-account performance optimisation which is the capability of managing campaign budgets across different search networks. As a result, bid strategies can be individually adapted to corporate structures and can also be used across different engine accounts (which are separated by country, market or brand, for example). With the new update, the new Search Ads 360 offers improved engine support for the several supported search engine channels and will also commit to further support future features. As of now, we already can see more than 10 Microsoft Advertising campaign features such as:

Responsive search ads.
Dynamic search ads.
Smart Shopping.
Call extensions.

Bidding Strategies

SA360 makes it possible to flexibly set up bid strategies across search engines, campaigns, ad groups or even keywords.

Unlike Google Ads, SA360 can be optimised for multiple conversions and on different sources under different target values within a bid strategy. A unique form of bid strategy not found in Google Ads is Budget Bid Strategies (BBS). Their ultimate goal is to stick to the budgets entered (whether on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis).

As a secondary goal, the algorithm will try to achieve the performance goal (CPA, ROAS or KUR/ERS) within the given budget. This form of bidding strategy is unique and particularly useful because the budget is strictly adhered to, and budgets can be planned and redistributed flexibly. This drastically simplifies time-consuming budget controls. With the new update, they are only “read only” in the beginning but can be “read write” later.

Multi-Account Management

With the new update, SA360 instead of managing campaigns at advertiser level (leading to a lot of repeated tasks), it’s now possible to oversee campaigns at the agency level in one, single overview. With this, it’s possible to do things across accounts, campaigns and search engines like:

Labels sharing.
Audience sharing.
Rules across all advertisers.
Copy and paste keywords across all client accounts.
Copy and pasting campaigns across several accounts (from the manager account level).
Ad Extensions can be shared between Google and Bing Ads, for example.

Reporting is also easier, as it’s now possible to see several performance data for multiple accounts (allowing to compare accounts side-by-side).

What’s next?

Throughout their announcements and several hosted webinars, Google has promised that we can expect a serious commitment to adopt new features throughout the rest of the year. From supporting more search engines along with their newest features (e.g. shopping campaigns in BING and more), to migrating Floodlight bidding to all campaign formats, SA360 will get a continuous evolving iteration process that is also based on given feedback or feature requests through the in-ui option.

Automation & Inventory Management

With SA360, we get the benefit of automation by creating highly scalable campaigns by using data from an inventory feed in order to create campaigns, ad groups, text ads, keywords and sitelinks. As you update inventory data, Search Ads 360 automatically updates the generated campaigns and other items.

Even though it’s not an immediate change for now, Inventory Management campaigns will undergo a revamp with this new SA360 update later in the year. They will now be called ‘Templates’ and will support extensions and labels. The Templates from the older SA360 can be migrated to the new environment but it’s expectable to see some differences that require manual adaptations for example, custom columns etc.

Maximize Conversion Value Support
Soon, it will be possible to used maximise conversion value.
Conversion Variable Adjustment
Conversion Value Rules will be coming to SA360 under the naming “custom variable adjustments”.
Floodlight Support
Floodlight will be supported by all new upcoming campaigns.

Who is SA360 suitable for?

When it comes to increasing performance and working at scale and data-driven, there is no way around SA360. SA360 is probably the best choice, especially for complex customers who use several search engines and are present in different countries or markets. With no other tool can data be viewed in such a centralised manner and campaign management can be controlled across multiple search engines from one interface.

SA360 is a solution especially for Enterprises because of their need for scaling, automation of campaigns on the one hand, and centralisation of all paid media data on the other, is one of the central challenges. Clients with large product/service, portfolio (dynamic), international clients (multi platform), data driven clients (Insights), combination with DV 360 (multi-touch insights).

By centralising your campaigns across different engines and countries, you’ll have direct control on bid management and performance. Featuring a host of attribution models, including SA360’s own Data Driven Attribution Model, you can credit the right keywords, ad groups and campaigns in one interface with cross-channel insights.

Within a single bidding strategy, campaign activation, keyword grouping, device, RSLA, reporting and location adjustments can all be automated on any scale.

SA360’s tooling allows bidding towards different goal types, engine accounts and custom metrics to optimise bidding on keywords and group levels. This helps optimise budget spending across the supported search engine accounts.