Search Ads 360 (SA360)

Manage enterprise search with consistent measurement, bidding and governance across multiple search platforms.

What it is

SA360 is Google’s enterprise search management platform. It sits above Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising, providing a single platform for managing campaigns, bidding, conversion measurement and reporting across search engines.

Campaigns continue to run within their respective advertising platforms, while SA360 adds an additional management layer through Floodlight conversions, bid strategies, business data and cross-platform reporting.

Its value lies in creating consistency across large search programs. Organisations can standardise conversion definitions, bidding strategies and reporting across multiple advertising platforms while integrating more closely with the broader Google Marketing Platform.

Why it matters

Search advertising has become increasingly automated, reducing the need for manual bid management while increasing the importance of consistent measurement and conversion governance.

SA360’s role has shifted alongside this. Rather than simply managing bids, it helps organisations apply consistent conversion definitions across search engines, connect search activity with Campaign Manager 360 and Display & Video 360, and support more sophisticated reporting through BigQuery and the wider Google Marketing Platform.

For organisations managing large or complex search programs, SA360 provides greater consistency, stronger governance and a more unified approach to search measurement and optimisation.

What Louder does

Implementation and migration - account structure, engine linking, floodlight configuration and migration from native-only management.
Conversion architecture - which conversions are defined where, which are shared, and which drive bidding on which campaign.
Bid strategy design - SA360 strategies versus native, portfolio structures, and the constraints each imposes.
Reporting infrastructure - BigQuery data transfers, Looker Studio layers and auction-level analysis beyond the UI.
Operational governance - naming, labels, business data feeds and the review cadence that keeps a large estate coherent.

Common challenges

Double-counting across floodlight and Google Ads conversions. The same action is tracked by a floodlight and a Google Ads tag, both are active, and reported conversions run well above what the business recorded.
Editing in the engine, not the platform. Changes made directly in Google Ads sync back unpredictably or get overwritten. Teams using both interfaces without a rule about which is authoritative generate constant low-grade drift.
Portfolio strategies spread too thin. Bid strategies applied across campaigns with insufficient combined conversion volume never exit the learning phase, and performance is worse than the native equivalent would have been.
Time zone mismatches in reporting. SA360, Google Ads and GA4 report on different clocks. Joins across them without normalisation produce discrepancies that get investigated as performance problems for weeks.