What’s new with Google’s Search Ads 360
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?
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 there the 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.
