Managing multiple search ad campaigns simultaneously can be quite challenging for agencies and advertisers. What’s even more challenging is managing search marketing campaigns across multiple platforms and media channels.
This is where Search Ads 360 comes in.
What is Search Ads 360?
Search Ads 360, formerly known as DoubleClick Search, is an advanced search management platform that allows brands to access multiple ad accounts and campaigns across multiple search engines with an integrated interface. The 360 platform is natively integrated with the Google Marketing Platform, which allows advertisers to manage and track campaigns seamlessly from a single place.
With Search Ads 360, advertisers can manage search marketing campaigns around the globe, across Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, Yahoo! Japan Sponsored Products, Baidu, and Yahoo! Gemini, and also media channels.
The platform provides advertisers access to a streamlined workflow and powerful reporting features that efficiently run campaigns, while the platform’s automated bidding improves campaign performance.
How does Search Ads 360 work?
The platform follows an agency structure, i.e. you can manage multiple advertising accounts under a single network. Each individual advertising account has its own group of paid search engine accounts and search campaigns:
Similar to advertising agencies that maintain separate teams to manage search and social marketing for multiple brands, Search Ads 360 allows you to manage multiple advertisers under a single agency network. Each of these advertisers contains its own group of engine accounts and campaigns, in addition to its own set of users who can view reports and edit settings.
Search Ads 360 utilizes direct API connections to swap a variety of information such as campaign settings, keywords, and ads with the following partner search engines:
- Google Ads
- Microsoft Advertising
- Yahoo! Japan Sponsored Products
- Baidu
- Yahoo! Gemini
The platform takes data directly from these search engines, integrates it, and presents it in a single user-friendly interface.
The 360 platform and search engines enjoy two-way sync. That’s because after you’ve connected the platform with a search engine, you can create and manage search marketing campaigns in the platform, which are automatically applied to each respective engine. Similarly, you can make changes directly in the search engines and import (sync) them into your Search Ads 360 dashboard.
To track performance metrics for individual ads, keywords, and other items, Search Ads 360 uses its own tracking URL called the “clickserver URL.” How a search engine interacts with the clickserver URL depends on its support of parallel tracking.
This chart describes how the platform acquires performance metrics for search engines that use parallel tracking:
For search engines that don’t use parallel tracking, the platform uses URL redirection to populate performance metrics. URL redirection sends a click to one or more service/vendors before taking it to the web page. The service/vendor the click goes to can add information to the URL, or it may use information in the URL for tracking activity:
Components of the 360 platform
The Search Ads 360 platform consists of three components:
- Campaigns: There are multiple types of campaigns available within the platform, such as:
You can create new campaigns from within the platform, but you can also import existing campaigns from search engines by syncing them with Search Ads 360.
- Bid Strategies: You can optimize your advertising spend across the list of supported search engine accounts. The platform aims to maximize search campaign performance across multiple engines with automated strategies. For example, Smart Bidding finds the optimal bids for maximizing the number of conversions on your site at a targeted CPA, effective revenue share (ERS), or return on advertising spend (ROAS).
- Reporting: Track search ad performance across search engines, bid strategies, and campaigns. With floodlight tags to track conversions, you can monitor activity on your site, along with reporting features for adding conversion data to your reports:
To find out more about additional features Search Ads 360 supports, review this Google article.
Search Ads 360 encompasses multiple search engines and syncs with different platforms delivering a unified and integrated search ad experience to advertisers. Display and Video 360 is a similar platform; however, it only focuses on display and video campaigns.
Why advertisers and agencies need Search Ads 360
By neglecting Search Ads 360, advertisers and agencies must manage their ads and keywords on each search engine separately. This makes it unnecessarily difficult to analyze your ad and keyword performance across search engines.
What’s more, the platform offers access to automated bidding strategies, which help save time, reduce complexity, and empower you to make better decisions while increasing your ROI for search marketing.
Primary benefits
Let’s detail everything Search Ads 360 helps advertisers and agencies achieve:
Use relevant ads and keywords across search engines
You can use Search Ads 360 campaigns to traffic ads and keywords on all the supported search engines. The ads and keywords in a Search Ads 360 campaign are mapped to a similar object on the search engine through a direct API connection.
So, when a user enters one of your chosen keywords on the search engine, an ad from the campaign may appear in the search results. The ad position on the search engine is based on the bid for the keyword (position is also based on other factors, such as ad quality and clickthrough rate, depending on the search engine). You can set this bid, as well as many other properties, directly through the Search Ads 360 dashboard.
Use optimized bid strategies
This is one of the key benefits because you can optimize your advertising spend across the supported search engine accounts. The platform monitors the performance of keywords and product groups, and adjusts bids to achieve:
- the highest number of conversions
- the highest amount of revenue
- the ideal ad position
- highest number of clicks your campaign budgets allow
Depending on the search engine, the platform’s bid strategies also set or recommend bid adjustments for your location targets, mobile devices, and remarketing targets. You don’t need to manually set bids or bid adjustments in response to changes in your campaigns, just automate the process with Search Ads 360 bid strategy.
Keep an eye on ad and keyword performance
The platform helps you analyze the performance of your campaign’s ads and keywords directly from the Campaigns tab in the Search Ads 360 dashboard. In the tab, you can see a snapshot of your bids’ performance and health, and even view how your ads/keywords are performing for any given metric, such as clicks, total cost/action, and conversion percentage.
Manage search campaigns better with Search Ads 360
Search Ads 360 has all the features you need to deliver faster insights, improved collaboration, and better results. you can manage your paid search activity across multiple search engines, accounts, campaigns — all in one place. Helping you run hassle-free, stress-free, and organized campaigns simultaneously.
The platform’s automated bidding and advanced reporting capabilities help advertisers and agencies manage their search campaigns more effectively and see a positive ROI across multiple search engines.
To learn about all the ad types available within Google Ads and every other major ad platform, download the Instapage Digital Advertising Reference Guide. Complete with ad specs and examples, no other resource compares.
