Your Guide to the New Search Ads 360 Experience

At the beginning of this year, Google launched the much-anticipated New Search Ads 360. Designed to resemble the Google Ads UI, this new experience brings a familiar look and feel with updated SA360 classics and new features ready to help you face the ever-changing world of search while streamlining your team’s day-to-day workflows. 

With that said, we understand that, despite the excitement surrounding the new experience, the correct migration path can be somewhat daunting if you’re unfamiliar with what steps to take. To help you know when and where to get started, we created a comprehensive guide to ease you into the new experience. 

Select a Sub-Manager Account 

When selecting a sub-manager to begin the migration process with, it is important to be strategic. In many ways, this advertiser will act as your testing environment as you and your team become familiar with the new look and features of the updated experience. 

Here are some factors you should look for when selecting a sub-manager:

1. Simple in Structure. 
   • Select a sub-manager that has straightforward bid strategies and strong pre-existing workflows
2. Widely Accessible
   • Be sure your team has access so they can begin to navigate the new UI prior to deprecation
3. Historical data
   • Choose a more senior sub-manager that allows a larger lookback window into the reporting differences between the two UIs. 

Navigate to the Experience Hub 

Once you’ve selected your sub-manager account, navigate to the experience hub located on the left-hand rail in both the legacy and new UIs. This hub is the central location for all migration processes and product updates. By toggling between the “What’s New,” “What’s Changed” and “What’s Available” tabs, you’ll see a holistic view of what you need to know about the new experience. 

As an example, in the “What’s Available” tab, you can locate migration-eligible features and see what additional steps you need to take to complete the data migration. Please keep in mind that every sub-manager’s migration timeline is unique. Some sub-managers may require additional time for engineering to prepare them for migration.

Take a Peek at the New Overview Tab

Another exciting UI feature sure to simplify your day-to-day workflow is the new cross-engine overview tab. Within this tab, you can locate relevant insights about your sub-manager’s performance in a single glance using the UI-curated data cards. These provide a high-level status of the overall “health” of your sub-manager account, and the date toggling feature allows you to see days you may have missed. 

Explore the Main Toolbar

Similar to the Google Ads UI, the new experience’s toolbar lives in the top-right corner of the UI. Here you can view saved reports, refresh data, adjust tools and settings, review notifications, get assistance via the help center and switch to a different platform within the GMP stack. Additionally, the ‘Tools and Settings’ button groups features, such as billing, user permissions, custom dimensions, bulk actions including rules and uploads, and your shared library.

Get To Know The New Hierarchy

Another significant change to the new search ads experience is its revamped account structure. This new hierarchy allows for more flexibility to create entities and share rules, columns and labels across various levels of your account’s organization.

For instance, when you create entities at your access level and your desired hierarchy level (Manager, Sub-manager, Client account), users with the same permissions can view those entities. However, access to entities becomes more restrictive the further down the hierarchy you create the entity. For example, a column built at the manager level can be shared with all other sub-manager accounts in the hierarchy, but a column built at the sub-manager level is only shared with its subordinate client accounts (Engines). 

Note: If you no longer have visibility into migrated legacy entities, please reach out to a colleague or whoever manages platform access to confirm that your level of access in the new UI is equivalent to your previous avatar from the legacy UI.

Learn the New Terminology

As you navigate the new experience, you may notice that Google updated or retired many legacy terms. To help you locate and learn the new terminology, Google created this comprehensive document located in the new experience help center. We highly recommend becoming acquainted with the new terms before jumping into the new UI, as these terms will be the new standard language of the SA360 UI post-migration. 

Migrate Your Bid Strategies and Budget Management (Optional)

On May 31st, Google began rolling out the new Performance Center by incrementally phasing in bidding migration to sub-managers (advertisers). To see if your sub-manager is eligible for bid migration, navigate to the “What’s available” tab under the experience hub in the new UI. 

If any of your sub-managers are eligible for migration, you’ll see this:

You may migrate your bid strategies by selecting ‘Get Started’. Once you opt-in, migration will begin the following Wednesday, this ensures that Google has a fully staffed engineering team assisting with the batched migrations. 

During migration, the legacy and new experience’s bidding and budget management will be disabled until the migration is complete. Furthermore, these features will become read-only in the legacy UI, and the data will cease to update post-migration. Due to this, please try to refrain from migrating clients during periods of expected high traffic or when your team predicts changes will need to be made to bid configurations. Finally, be sure to notify all necessary team members when the migration is occurring to lessen any confusion.

Although the new UI is still not ready for full adoption, we highly recommend immersing yourself in the currently available features during this transition time. 

Looking for more insights into how you can get up and running in the new Search Ads 360? Let us know how we can help!