Google just announced major changes to the Search Ads 360 (SA360) platform, with a new user interface and enhancements to the management, automation, and optimization capabilities.
A Streamlined User Interface
The new Search Ads 360 user experience is designed to be faster and more efficient to navigate, with a look, feel, and navigation familiar to search engine platform users.
The new user interface is designed to help surface curated, relevant performance insights automatically across all levels of your account hierarchy.
Here are a few critical areas of improvement:
- Accounts view: You can view key metrics and gain an understanding of performance at the account level on the overview page. You also have access to a new Experience Hub, which lets you stay current on the latest updates to the user interface.
- Campaigns view: This view includes a performance summary and a table of all enabled, paused, and removed campaigns.
- Charts: This component is a visual representation of performance, customized by selecting your desired metrics, date range, and chart type.
- Main toolbar: The toolbar allows you to view saved reports, access tools, sync with Google Ads accounts, refresh data, get help, receive notifications, or easily switch between Google marketing products.
Scalable Management Features
In the new Search Ads 360, advertisers can manage campaigns across the entire agency and generate performance reporting across all advertisers or within individual client accounts as needed. It’s all about centralizing key management and reporting functions. You can use workflow tools, such as labels, custom columns, and automated rules, across advertisers or an entire agency parent account.
Additionally, the new user interface provides more defined role structures for admins and billing access. For example, the admins with billing roles allow the user full access to the account and user roles and permissions. In contrast, the admins without billing role does not allow the user to edit the admin role and does not have billing permissions.
You’ve taken the time to develop internal best practices, conventions, and automation practices – now, with the new Search Ads 360, it’s easier to apply them consistently across your clients or your in-house organization.
Enhanced Data Integrations and Optimizations
To continue increasing efficiencies, you can leverage automated bidding with Google’s machine learning algorithms and “auction-time bidding” to optimize bids toward tCPA (target cost per acquisition), tROAS (target return on ad spend), maximize conversions, or maximize conversion value. This strategy includes utilizing online and offline conversions via floodlights or Google Analytics 4 (GA4).
In the new user interface, you can update floodlight settings directly in the Search Ads 360 platform. Furthermore, a two-way data integration is available for Search Ads 360 and Google Analytics 4, allowing you to access behavioral metrics and conversions from Google Analytics 4 to optimize campaigns within your Search Ads 360 account. The integration allows direct, continuous audience sharing from Google Analytics 4 to Search Ads 360, a feature that was not part of the Universal Analytics (GA360) and Search Ads 360 integration. Also of note, the GA4 to SA360 integration is available for both standard (free) and 360 status Google Analytics 4 properties.
New Naming Conventions
A couple of fundamental changes you will see when your account is activated for the new user experience relate to naming.
In the old user interface, your parent account was called the Agency ID with a corresponding Agency Name. That changes to Manager. The current Advertiser ID becomes the Sub-Manager, and the Engine Accounts transition to Client Accounts in the new Search Ads 360 experience.
Other terminology changes include:
- Engine → Account Type
- Account Name → Account
- Business → Custom Dimensions
- Formula Columns → Custom Columns
- Budget Management → Performance Center
- Rules + Scheduled Edits → Rules
More Enterprise Features
As the revised naming conventions suggest, the new Search Ads 360 is also designed to go beyond search management to provide management and optimization features across most, if not all, of the buys you execute through your ‘search’ platforms, such as Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, and smaller players, such as Yahoo! Japan.
Expect to see more integrated support for different ad formats, like dynamic search in Yahoo!, and responsive search ads in Microsoft Advertising.
The new Performance Center takes key elements of the planning tools from the Google Ads platform and combines them with the budget tools from classic Search Ads 360 to provide you with increased flexibility around budget planning, budget management, and performance forecasting, ultimately providing more options for you to manage spend along with bid strategies for performance.
The new Search Ads 360 experience represents one of the most significant upgrades to the SA360 platform we have seen in recent years, and the roadmap for this platform continues this investment in our changing advertising ecosystem.
Here are a few screenshots of what you’ll see in the new Search Ads 360 interface:
Image 1: A new look and feel with easily digestible performance metrics and trends.
Image 2: An updated naming convention/hierarchy, with Manager and Sub-Manager replacing Agency and Advertiser.
Image 3: Account-wide, cross-advertiser reports built into the reporting interface.
Image 4: Clearly marked performance ‘notifications’, identified as opportunities to fix/edit/improve directly from the list, make account improvements easy to uncover and prioritize.
