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Head of Paid Media
Industry News
The next generation of Search Ads 360 has arrived with a brand-new look, deeper engine support and many advanced enterprise innovations. Designed to evolve into a familiar and easy-to-use interface, the update takes inspiration from existing search engine ad platforms to create a consistent experience across all products.
Moving in line with Google Ads, as well as taking inspiration from Microsoft Ads, the update is designed to make it easier than ever for anyone to upgrade to SA360. Driven by user feedback, the new simplified SA360 allows you to manage day-to-day tasks within one user interface by supporting more search engine features.
Bringing everything into one place, new cross-advertiser opportunities enable users to report and manage their activity at the agency level (similar to Google Ads MCC level). Support across multiple third-party partners in the new infrastructure is designed to streamline multiple advertising channels and search engines.
For example, the platform offers support for a number of new Yahoo! Japan features including Dynamic Ads For Search and sitelink extension scheduling, as well as over ten Microsoft Advertising features including responsive search ads, call extensions, local inventory ads and additional Microsoft audience types like customer match.
The budget management feature has been upgraded to ‘Performance Centre’. Using the latest machine learning technology, planning and forecasting simulate up to 12 months ahead with automated budget and bid management to hit your goals. Forecasting is also constantly updated, detecting the latest trends to provide the most relevant and accurate recommendations possible.
Updates to reporting dashboards include intuitive, cross-engine summaries of key metrics and top-performing areas, as well as customisable charts, graphs and tables free to download and provide alternate perspectives.
With this update and subsequent updates throughout the year, Google plans for SA360 to become a ‘one-stop-shop’ for managing search campaigns. Currently, there is often a requirement to log into Google Ads or Microsoft Ads to reach certain reports or actions. The goal is to integrate platforms so that SA360 users only need to log into one platform.
Image source: Google
SA360’s current version will remain fully functional. The updated version will have many day-to-day functions that work across both the previous and new experiences. Several advanced features including bid strategies, budget management and inventory management will remain in the previous experience for now to avoid conflicts of managing across two locations.
Midway through the year when Google deems customers are ready, the process of moving advanced features to the new experience will begin. Once users decide to migrate to the new tool, their advanced features will be in the new SA360 and no longer manageable in the previous. All basic day-to-day features will continue to exist in both versions.
During the back half of the year, dependency on the previous SA360 will be reduced, moving all day-to-day activities into the new SA360.
Neil Rodley, our Search Ads 360 product expert said:
“This update has been in the works for a long time, so it’s great to finally see it getting released. The product (previously known as DoubleClick Search) was acquired by Google back in 2008, so in recent years, updates to SA360 has struggled to keep pace with innovation taking place elsewhere in digital due to the underlying architecture it was built with.
“Now that the product has been brought in line with Google Ads, we expect the development of new features to pick up pace, with some exciting evolution in the pipeline for the next 12 months.”
As a Google Marketing Platform Sales Partner, Search Laboratory is one of just a handful of agencies trusted by Google to sell and service Search Ads 360.
Buying Search Ads 360 directly through a reseller such as ourselves gives you full access to and ownership of your campaign data, as well as the ability to manage campaigns in-house should you wish to. You can contact us for more information.
Insights
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