If your Paid Search performance feels like it’s plateauing - even with smart bidding in place - you’re not alone. As budgets tighten and ROI scrutiny increases, every click, impression, and conversion has to work harder. That’s where Search Ads 360 (SA360) comes into its own.
Far more than a bidding platform, SA360 offers enterprise-grade tools that unlock greater efficiency, smarter budget control, and better cross-channel decisioning. But to fully realise its potential, you need to go beyond the basics.
In this guide, we’ll break down the latest SA360 bidding strategies, covering both foundational and advanced techniques, so you can move from tactical optimisation to strategic advantage.
Start with the Fundamentals: Basic SA360 Bidding Strategies!
In Paid Search, effective use of bid strategies is crucial to delivering the performance that matters to your business. SA360 (Search Ads 360) offers advanced solutions to enhance campaign performance.
These bid strategies exist on both Google Ads directly and SA360, but we would always advise implementing on SA360 if possible to make use of the enhanced measurement features that Floodlight tagging offers.
- Target Impression Share: Maximise visibility on search result pages.
- Maximise Clicks: Drive as many clicks as possible.
- Target CPA: Achieve conversions at a specific cost per acquisition.
- Target ROAS: Optimise for conversion value relative to ad spend.
Advanced and Unique SA360 Bid Strategies
However, there are some bid strategies that are only available on SA360. Budget Bid Strategies (BBS) are the prime example, and can optimise campaigns effectively within a fixed budget whilst also presenting the option of having a performance efficiency goal for the strategy to aim for.
If you find that you have many campaigns that have a “Limited by Budget” status, BBS could be worth exploring.
“Typically, advertisers with budget-constrained campaigns who adopt a Search Ads 360 budget bid strategy can get up to 10% more conversions or conversions value at a similar spend and ROI.” - Google Internal Data, June 2024.
Alongside this performance improvement, Google understands that advertisers require certain control over their use of budget. With more capabilities to set minimum spend thresholds by account type, alongside the ability to set spend thresholds over custom periods, SA360 are providing a more feasible alternative bid strategy when spending a set budget is the primary KPI.
Making the Most of SA360 Bid Strategies: Consolidated Portfolios
Consolidated Portfolios are simply multiple bid strategy portfolios combined into larger portfolios for better performance. If you find your account split into many separated parts, whether this is by Engine (Google Ads, Microsoft Ads etc.) or Channel (Search, PMAX etc.), it could be worth revisiting the reasons why this is the case, and adjusting your approach. SA360 cites many benefits of consolidating your strategies to improve your performance:
- Target Accuracy: Consolidating strategies reduces statistical noise for more stable bidding decisions, spend levels and reliability.
- Faster Reactions: Consolidated strategies improve the confidence level of the decisions being made and can therefore adjust more rapidly to changing auction dynamics.
- Increased Flexibility: Consolidated strategies allow the system to explore many options to achieve the best performance around potential constraints and caps that might impede an individual strategy.
- Simplified Management: The ability to manage strategies at scale means easier account management and more time allocated into strategic focuses.
“Typically, advertisers that adopt Search Ads 360 multi-channel/engine optimisation portfolios can expect to see 5% more conversions or conversion value as compared to optimising channels and engines independently” - Google Internal Data, April-July 2024.
There may still be an important reason to segment your bid strategies specific to your advertising strategy, but if the reason for keeping a segmented approach is becoming outdated then it could be time to test consolidating.
Through Budget Bid Strategies, Consolidated Portfolios and new options to test and granularly optimise bid strategies, SA360 are offering some advanced features to get the best out of your campaigns. We expect more advancement like this over the next 12 months as SA360 continue their development as an enterprise bidding solution, and create a point of differentiation from both competitors, and Google Ads.
Do you want to see what smarter bidding can do for your business? Get in touch to explore how SA360 can deliver stronger results from your search investment.
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