SA360 Home: a better starting point for managing search performance

In summary

• A new starting point for SA360: Home replaces the existing Overview page with a customisable dashboard, allowing teams to prioritise campaign metrics, keywords, creatives and AI-powered insights through drag-and-drop tiles.
• Simpler workflows and greater visibility: Saved dashboard views help agencies monitor performance more consistently across accounts, while AI Spotlight brings diagnostic insights into daily workflows, although some campaign and bidding setups remain unsupported.
• Human expertise remains essential: Gemini-powered suggestions can highlight areas worth investigating, but interpreting those insights and deciding what action to take still requires an understanding of campaign objectives and performance.

A new starting point for search campaign performance

A new ‘Home’ tab has been introduced in Search Ads 360 (SA360), allowing you to monitor the performance of your search campaigns and more, in a much more flexible way.

Announced yesterday as part of the first monthly Google Marketing Platform Drop for 2026 (22nd October), Google’s new Home for Search Ads 360 is a completely new starting point for SA360. Home is a new customisable dashboard replacing the current Overview page for monitoring search campaign performance etc.

It will aid people who have lots of accounts and campaigns, as it allows them to check the accounts’ performance without having to continually switch between reports and different parts of the platform.

A more flexible view of search performance

The new Google Search Ads 360 Home tab is different from the previous Overview page for Search Ads 360 accounts. The Home tab for Google Search Ads 360 offers a new starting point for SA360 for Viewers, Editors and Admins. Home is a customisable dashboard for monitoring search campaign performance.

As a dashboard view, the Home tab utilises a tile based, drag-and-drop configuration to allow the user to arrange their search Ad performance metrics, keywords, creatives and AI Spotlight insights of greatest importance to them first. The user can save as many configurations as they require to switch between different views of their Ad campaign performance data.

Users can expand and collapse the visuals within tiles as needed. In addition, each tile includes a link to the relevant campaigns for deeper analysis of performance.

We will outline the different actions that users can take from Home as more information is provided by Google. For now, it’s worth noting that Gemini has been brought into the Saved Dashboard Views’ workflow so that users can utilise Gemini’s powered suggestions and ideas for investigation into performance of accounts, into Saved Views to help track that Saved View.

Google is building on the existing functionality of SA360 custom dashboards already available through the platform’s reporting function. The main difference here is that Home offers instant access to a pre-defined and highly relevant set of performance metrics and related insights for selected search accounts.

Advertisers and agencies with a large number of search campaigns will benefit from having the key information at their fingertips without having to switch between screens.

Bringing AI Spotlight into the daily workflow

We are seeing AI Spotlight, Google’s diagnostic tool for search activities within SA360, be brought into the Home view of search activities in SA360.

AI Spotlight - Google’s diagnostic tool for SA360, finding issues in your campaigns and highlighting changes in their performance including context around external factors such as news.

By integrating the AI-powered diagnostic tool in AI Spotlight into the Home view, it becomes a natural part of the workflow for agencies and their account managers. It flags campaign settings that differ from similar campaigns, identifies unusual performance increases and decreases and provides additional context about external news and market influences on conversions.

Teams can then utilise the added information from AI Spotlight to investigate whether the change in performance is caused by external market information or changes to their campaigns and account.

There are, however, some limitations.

Note that AI Spotlight insights are limited to the following: campaigns that are not running off of shared budgets and campaigns that are not using a SA360 bid strategy. Therefore, users will not be able to receive the best insights regarding the account as a whole.

It’s also worth noting that any AI-recommended actions that the AI Spotlight tool identifies are intended to serve as a starting point for further investigation and not a definitive understanding of the full performance of an advertiser’s account.

Where to find the new Home experience

Home is first launched off the sub-manager account level where Google has seen most agencies run their day-to-day client work.

Sub-manager accounts are organised under manager accounts in order to serve individual clients, brands or product lines.

If you do not yet see the Home experience for your sub-manager account, you can check the Experience hub for that account to see what other features are available and what is coming soon.

There is as yet no complete rollout plan for this experience outlined by Google, and therefore whether it is yet available in a given sub-manager account, and if not, when it will be, remains to be seen.

How to make the most of SA360 Home

The Home experience in SA360 will only be as good as the team uses it.

Instead of flooding a dashboard with all the metrics SA360 offers, recommend 2 effective views for starting off with Home.

The daily performance check would then cover key metrics (such as spend, conversions) and highlight any issues flagged up by the AI in the AI Spotlight section of Home.

A weekly view of the same data pulled together in a format for consideration of overall performance of campaigns, keywords and creative, highlighting areas of positive performance and areas for optimisation.

Keeping these views focused will be critical to get value from Home, as a 15 tile dashboard will look a lot like an old Overview page and will not provide much value.

This is especially relevant for larger agencies who have many people working on many sub-manager accounts. Having the same dashboard set up on all of these will allow them to work more efficiently on a daily basis.

These insights will need to be viewed in the context of your campaign objectives, historic performance within your account and wider business performance.

Ultimately, Home in SA360 does not provide more information to manage search in SA360. Rather it provides more practical ways to use the information that already exists to manage search in SA360.

It will be of great value to Advertisers, enabling them to monitor and manage their search advertising campaigns more effectively and efficiently. And it will be of great value to the people in the teams of Advertisers, enabling them to spend less time trying to get to grips with the ins and outs of a complex online system and more time optimising their campaigns.

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