Google recently shared its H2 roadmap for new Search Ads 360 (SA360) features and updates, and we’re excited to see them in action. With a redesigned collaborative Home experience, smarter bidding strategies, and new Demand Gen capabilities, you and your teams will have more control over your campaigns and your workflows.
One of this year's biggest planned Search Ads 360 updates is a new customizable Home experience. The new UI gives your teams one place to see performance and act on it, with business intelligence–style dashboards built directly into Search Ads 360.
At the center of the experience are custom dashboards, which you design around each line of business so every team can focus on the performance data that's relevant to them.
You’ll see that your campaigns, bid strategies, and ad groups sit side by side instead of on separate pages. Your existing custom columns stay in place, and you can create new ones on the fly without leaving the page.
As you work, smarter AI insights keep recommendations scoped to whichever campaigns you're viewing, so they stay relevant to the work in front of you. When you're ready to make a change, you can edit campaigns and bid strategies inline, in the dashboard, rather than navigating back and forth between tabs.
The new Home experience makes it easy for large teams to work from Search Ads 360. These dashboards are shareable, so everyone can work from the same data and views, down to the columns, instead of each person building their own version. Once you configure an element, you can copy and reuse it instantly.
Google designed the experience to fit into your teams’ workflows. It consolidates and streamlines your daily tasks while keeping your reporting views the same, so you don’t have to migrate your current reports or relearn how to access your performance data.
We know search marketers get frustrated when their high-performing campaigns hit their daily budget caps while other campaigns aren’t spending. Google knows, too, and is currently beta testing a solution: Adaptive Budgets.
Google designed Adaptive Budgets to help you automatically move your budget where it can make the most impact. While a shared budget only works for individual campaign types within a specific publisher, Adaptive Budgets works across the entire supported portfolio of campaigns, types, and publishers. You retain your campaign-level baseline budgets so you can push or pull spend at any time.
The strategy offers:
With Adaptive Budgets, you stay in control; you can set global guardrails or add specific rules to protect or limit individual campaigns.
Multi-target portfolios let you group campaigns together while keeping distinct cost-per-acquisition (CPA) or return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) targets for different products or regions. According to Google, Search Ads 360 MTPs already deliver around 5% more conversions or conversion value than standalone bid strategies. Adding the budget fluidity you get from Adaptive Budgets helps you get even more value from every dollar across your target tiers.
In a typical multi-target portfolio, a top-performing campaign can max out its daily cap and stop serving. Adaptive Budgets shifts your unused dollars from other campaigns to keep that campaign running.
However, you still get to decide how much flexibility the algorithm gets. You can set giving and receiving tolerances for individual campaigns to protect your core drivers while still benefiting from the shared budget pool.
With Google Ads Demand Gen capabilities in Search Ads 360, you can set sales, lead, and website traffic goals at the account and campaign level, and let your Floodlight conversions drive Google Ads bidding. Soon, Demand Gen support will be available in Adaptive Budgets, portfolios, and multi-target portfolios.
Because Floodlight drives bidding for Demand Gen, you also open the door to cross-channel attribution within Google Marketing Platform (GMP). Floodlight is also becoming more complete, as we covered in our recap of the latest Campaign Manager 360 updates.
You can:
New Demand Gen campaigns now use view-through conversion-optimized bidding by default, capturing the full value of impressions from day one. You can enable it for existing campaigns in your campaign settings.
View-through conversion metrics and values are available directly in the Search Ads 360 interface. They appear in the Conversions column and roll into “All Conversions” for supported campaign types. A dedicated view-through conversions column offers both biddable and non-biddable options.
Demand Gen in Search Ads 360 gives you more flexibility in where your ads run and how you test creative. Coverage now extends beyond YouTube to Google Discover and Gmail, and you can combine single-image ads, carousel images, and video assets in one campaign. Once your assets are in place, you can set creative preferences to pin video assets to specific formats and run A/B experiments on your creative.
Google is deprecating video action campaigns, which means you’ll no longer create new ones. Google is also automatically upgrading all existing video action campaigns to Demand Gen campaigns in both Google Ads and Search Ads 360. If your team runs video action campaigns, review the upgraded versions to explore what’s new.
Between a more collaborative workspace, budget that moves with performance, and Floodlight-powered bidding, Search Ads 360 is poised to offer more efficiency and return on your platform investment. And these are just a few of the highlights of what’s new and in store for Search Ads 360 users this year. You can learn about a few other features we’re excited about in our team’s recent blog post, “How SA360 helps advertisers stay ahead of AI-driven search shifts.”
As these updates and others roll out, take stock of where they fit into your workflows and where your team has the biggest opportunities. And if you need help, please reach out. We’d love to show you how to get the most value out of your Search Ads 360 investment.