Google rebranded its ‘DoubleClick Search’ platform in 2018 as ‘Search Ads 360’. Find out below how it works and why we highly recommend using it for PPC campaigns.
What is Search Ads 360?
Search Ads 360 (SA 360) is a Google-owned search management platform, helping agencies and marketers manage large search marketing campaigns across multiple engines and media channels. It allows marketers to save time, reduce a lot of complexity and have the ability to make better decisions, increasing the return on investment for search campaigns.
Unlike Adwords or Bing ads which are free platforms, Search Ads 360 comes with a price tag. But is it worth it? Here are five reasons why you should highly consider taking the leap.
1 – Manage multiple search engine accounts from one interface
No more spending time switching interfaces; find all the data from your Google, Bing, Baidu, Yahoo accounts and more all in one place. Search Ads 360 offers a very simple way to optimise and report on accounts, as well as manage them from one interface.
No need to manually copy and import into the individual campaigns. Save time adding in negatives, making bid adjustments, and automating bid strategies to all your search campaigns and allow yourself to focus on more strategic changes.
SA 360 is also perfect for large international campaigns which use many different engines thanks to the multi-platform dashboard. It compiles all your information in one place so you save time, and avoid user error when comparing data.
2 – Realtime executive reporting
This is a positive for both marketers and clients. These automated reports can be sent out with a frequency you decide which will save agencies massive amounts of time. You can design them to be as detailed as you want them to be and can even provide cross-engine reports. No more Excel nightmares trying to compile Bing & Google data. It’s also easy to change and adapt the information in these reports at any time.
Executive reports update automatically, analysing the data from all search engines linked to SA 360. With this real-time reporting, both the marketer and the client can stay up to date with what’s going on whenever they choose
They are easy to build, intuitive, and you can also import data from an external source to include in your reports if needed. They are also very visual and easy for clients to understand and digest the data. PPC is all about numbers and it’s easy to forget that it might not speak to everyone the way it speaks to the professionals. Appealing and simple reporting is completely invaluable to a client.
This is the sort of data you can expect to see:
Pretty user-friendly, right? Fancy learning more about the basics of PPC? Check out our beginners PPC training course.
3 – Automated bidding strategies and rules
Search Ads 360 uses some of the best learning algorithms to help automatically make bid changes based on who they think is most likely going to convert. By using customisable “bid strategies”, SA 360 can change bids across 10,000 keywords, multiple times a day, something a human at a desk could never do!
Some of the many types of bids strategies you can implement by collecting your keywords into a specific group based on their performance include keyword positional strategy, conversion strategy, and more advanced bid strategies that you want to meet a multitude of different criteria. The opportunities are literally endless.
For example, if you want some of your best-performing keywords to always have a high position, you can put them into a new specific group and set a rule to make automatic bid adjustments, ensuring these keywords always rank between 1.2 and 1.6.
These automations can be performed across search engines if you’re going for a global strategy or for each search engine if you want to give a more granular approach for each go.
4 – Ad copy testing function
Thanks to the experiment tool available in Search Ads 360, A/B ad testing is extremely quick and easy. You can house all current live ad copy testing across multiple engines, all in one place! You can even set start and end dates for your ad copy tests. You can test headlines, click through rates and a whole range of different things and at the same time report on these numbers within the SA 360 platform. Any outside contributing factor that may impact the results is being taken into account by Search Ads 360, which starts these tests on a one-to-one ratio so ads are getting the same type of visibility.
The data collected through these tests is very clear to analyse and understand, allowing users to think more about the strategic changes to make without losing time analysing the performance of each ad across all accounts. This feature will save marketers time and save clients money.
5 – Labels
Labels are a great way to note changes and keep track of your account performance. They help keep every layer of an account organised, it allows you to highlight potential problems you want to come back to, areas where you’re testing, organise your ad copy as well as set rules based on labels. You can also keep track of when budgets were updated and look back at it later on.
The label inheritance feature allows you to label a campaign and SA 360 will apply this label to the ad groups and keywords within. Making good use of this labelling feature is essential to help optimise, manage and report on your accounts more efficiently on a day-to-day basis.
Conclusion
You might have understood that, here at Passion Digital, we are in love with Search Ads 360. There are millions of features of SA 360 that can help gain great results for client and marketer alike. If we’ve piqued your interest in the wonder of paid advertising, then please head over to our PPC information page for more information. Alternatively, you can become a complete expert by attending one of our advanced PPC training courses.