As someone who has spent countless hours switching back and forth between the previous SA360 and the Google Ads’ UI, the new experience is a long time coming. The updates will offer SA360 advertisers an efficient workflow and stronger cross-engine compatibility, all within a single search management platform. Below is an in-depth look at what to look forward to as SA360 rolls out in 2022.

Greater Workflow Efficiencies

Google has shaped the new SA360 experience around achieving greater workflow efficiencies by implementing updates designed to minimize unnecessary repetitive tasks. One of the updates that I’m most excited about is the new and improved cross-platform support of the Google Ads Labels feature. Advertisers will no longer be required to recreate and reapply the same labels, as any labels linked to Google Ads will automatically become available in the new SA360 interface. This was one of the most requested features amongst my colleagues and clients, so it’s great that it’s finally here. The previous requirement of recreating and reapplying labels in SA360 through manual operations, such as bulk edits and excel uploads, will now be a thing of the past! 

There are more avenues to scale with centralization through enhanced cross-advertiser management. With the previous SA360, customizing reporting views or campaign management done at the “Advertiser” platform level has always operated individually. The new SA360 experience will address this by granting the ability to report and manage campaign activities across multiple Advertisers at once. Noticeable workflow improvements include the option to create custom columns (previously called formula columns) at the Manager (previously “Agency”) level, to execute bulk changes to multiple accounts simultaneously and to duplicate entities across engines or the Advertiser level with a new copy and paste function.

These new SA360 updates drive greater productivity for advertisers with many search engine accounts and agencies who would like to organize client reporting tasks simultaneously. 

A Familiar UI with Upgraded Navigation

Google has intentionally made the new SA360 look and feel more like the current Google Ads interface. Users that are already experienced in Google Ads will see immediate benefits and feel right at home with the new SA360. This is also useful for training and adoption, as any familiarity of the Google Ads UI navigation and workflow processes will translate over to the new SA360 (or vice versa) for one consistent experience and quicker adoption. It’s also an added bonus that Microsoft Ads has a very similar interface!

Vastly Improved Search Engine Support

The new SA360 and Google Ads now share core common technology powering the functionality and capabilities of both platforms, resulting in the ability to manage and process more data than ever, all while maintaining a fast user experience. This also means that previously unsupported features within SA360 will soon become available in the new version. Google has also confirmed the support for campaign types including Performance Max, Discovery Ads and Local Inventory Ads. 

To add to this, upgraded engine feature support such as extensions, audiences and creative formats for alternatives to Google (i.e. Microsoft RSA, DSA & smart shopping) will also be included in the upcoming updates. This improved support will allow advertisers to complete much more of their day-to-day workflow from within a single search marketing platform. Advertisers that are currently using SA360 to manage standard paid search campaigns and Google Ads to manage Performance Max or Discovery campaigns should be celebrating right now, as the management and reporting of all three campaign types can be done under the new SA360! This will also make it easier for dashboard reporting (i.e. third-party data or Data Studio) as users can include a single data source.

 

Updated Google Analytics Integration and Support for GA4

In the new SA360 experience, Google continues to develop SA360’s native integration with other GMP products, in particular with Google Analytics (GA4) properties. The new SA360-GA4 integration enables the import of GA4’s web and in-app event metrics into the SA360 reporting UI, allowing for additional measurement and optimization into how search activities are performing against web or in-app based events. Additionally, if Google Analytics Goals are your reporting and measurement source of truth, web or in-app-based GA4 Goals are available to use as a conversion source for performance automation and optimization—a handy alternative to Google Ads conversion tracking or floodlight tracking tags.

Bridging the Gap Between Platforms

When onboarding and training new clients in the previous SA360, one of the most frequently asked questions is: “Should we migrate our day-to-day workflow from Google Ads to SA360?”

I’ve always recommended that teams combine Google Ads campaign management workflows with SA360 performance optimization workflows (as opposed to using only one or the other) to get the most value out of both platforms. There will still be some instances that require switching between both. However, with the launch of the new experience, we’re seeing a big step with the new SA360 in the right direction in bridging the gap and enabling teams to use one interface for most tasks.



With the enterprise advantages of using a search management platform for engine consolidation, management, reporting and automation, we’re very excited for the streamlined and efficient workflows when transitioning search engine accounts’ daily tasks over to the new SA360 experience—and search marketers will be, too.

What will happen and when?

The free version of Universal Analytics will become read-only on July 1, 2023. The GA360 version of UA will become read-only on October 1, 2023.

For those on GA360, you will have at least six months after signing a Google Analytics 4 contract before your UA property is downgraded. 

What do you need to do?

They say the best time to plant a tree was 100 years ago…and the second-best time to plant a tree is now. Those who started the GA4 journey early will be in good shape, ready to have year-on-year comparison data. 

If you haven’t started your GA4 journey, start now. A realistic deadline to work towards is October 2022, which gives you 12 months of GA4 data for comparison purposes. Start with a Minimum Viable Product, which is a simple way to start swimming in GA4 waters. It takes 30 minutes to set up, involves just one tag, and yields a surprising amount of data. It also has no impact on GA360 billing and no impact on current data collection.    

When you’re ready, Media.monks is here to help support your migration. Media.Monks offers a wide array of analytics services and training so every one of our clients receives the consultation they need for a first class, end-to-end analytics roadmap and a seamless transition.

With Topics, Chrome determines several thematic interests, like “Fitness” or “Travel,” based on a user’s recent browsing history. Topics are calculated and stored entirely on a user’s device without communicating with Google’s servers. They are designed to be transparent and viewable by the user, as well as easily interpreted by potential advertisers via a JavaScript API. This makes Topics a future-proofed solution for simply and clearly providing user’s browsing interests for site owners and advertisers, without exposing detailed browsing history or cookie-based identifiers.

While Topics are aimed primarily at enabling advertisers, it could help with better onsite actions using tools like Google Optimize, Adobe Target, Optimizely, or other onsite testing and personalization platforms.

Brands Need to Look Beyond the Third-Party Cookie

Currently, most optimization or personalization tools cannot be used directly to customize onsite content based on interests. If they can, they are reliant on data management platforms (DMPs) and other brittle solutions that continue to require soon-to-be-deprecated third-party cookies. 

For example, Google Optimize cannot be used directly based on interest or affinity information inferred from third-party cookies. Instead, interest data provided by users who consented to third-party cookie tracking is currently available in Google Analytics for reporting and analysis purposes. 

Since this data is not available for use in audiences shared with Google Optimize, one is unable to target or personalize onsite experiences based on it. Alternatively, while Adobe Target may be able to access this data through API integrations with DMPs, it is also dependent on soon-to-be deprecated third-party cookies, making the data integration moot.

Chrome’s implementation of the Topics API meanwhile presents a ripe opportunity for personalization tools to leverage user interests, agnostic of the third-party ecosystem. In particular, a user’s interest topics will be stored entirely on the browser and accessible via API, meaning that they can be surfaced to a website or other API caller without reference to an opaque third-party cookie. 

This change enables accessibility of users’ Topics directly within the browser, rather than having to be processed on Google’s servers—meaning that a tool like Google Optimize will be able to query and read a user’s Topics in real time when they land on a website, leading to better onsite personalization in a first party context on the browser.

How Topics Can Enable Post-Cookie Targeting

Imagine a user visits our site www.ecommerce.com. As they land on the site, a query to the Topics API returns a relevant interest for that user is “Fitness.” We can surface that topic to an optimization/personalization platform (e.g. Optimize or Target) for targeting, resulting in the optimization platform changing the homepage banner to direct that user to our Fitness product category. 

In this way, Topics and a personalization engine could be used to:

• Update landing page copy and imagery to be more relevant
• Personalize a homepage banner to hero relevant product categories
• Feature content or articles more relevant to a user’s interests 
• Feed personalized recommendations to users

Pending the exact specifications of how Topics are eventually rolled out, even more advanced use cases may be made possible via storing and linking a user’s topics with a first-party identifier. A first party identifier could be cookie based for anonymous users (e.g. a cookie ID like Google’s client ID), or an identifier linked to a known/authenticated user (e.g. a customer ID, a hashed email address etc). In the above example, it may be possible for the user’s “Fitness” topic to be tracked against their first party identifier in an Analytics tool (e.g. stored alongside a customer ID in Google Analytics). 

Once associated with a user’s first-party Universally Unique ID (UUID), this topic could then be integrated with CRM data and used to power relevant marketing automation emails. The topic could also be used to generate more relevant retargeting audiences (e.g. via customer match) or be used to power dynamic creative. Personalization to that level now seems like a hygiene factor with a recent McKinsey report sharing how 71% of customers  expect at least a basic level of personalization. However, a fine line needs to be maintained in how data informs the creative process rather than dominates it. 

Prepare for Cookie Deprecation Now

Topics are still a very new proposal from Google that has been released in order to prompt discussion and feedback, meaning that the actual Topics API has not been thoroughly tested by partners and stakeholders yet. While we can speculate on use cases and possible applications to personalization, all of the above will have to be tested thoroughly as the Topics API is rolled out by Google. 

While we await more detail and further evolution of the Topics API proposal, businesses can partially execute on these use cases by deploying a platform to test and personalize on their website, as well as targeting affinity/interest audiences either via media targeting or profiles available via data management platforms. This would mean a proactive approach to adapt to the eventual deprecation of third-party cookies. Topics may represent a way forward for providing more relevant customer experiences (both onsite and advertising) in a more robust, privacy-centric way.

How is cost per click calculated?

The amount you spend for a digital click is broadly determined by four factors:

• Competition: more advertisers mean you are directly competing with more bidders in the auction.
• Quality Score: taking into account the quality of your ad and how relevant your ad message and landing page is to the search query.
• Bidding strategy: your maximum bid you are willing to spend per click or impression.
• Seasonality: when you advertise also has an impact on your cost per click. For example, if Black Friday is a popular time for competitors bidding, this will mean you are competing with more advertisers in the auction.

In Google Ads, you specify your maximum bid for keywords or phrases, then Google evaluates your ad to determine its quality score. Your quality score and maximum bid together make your Ad Rank. Google will use this Ad Rank to compare you to other advertisers. This is important so that only relevant and good quality ads are shown at the top of search results, a benefit to both the user and the advertiser.

Google then works backwards to answer the question: what is the bid the advertiser with the highest Ad Rank needs to win the auction? This is where the formula above comes from. The highest you will ever pay is your maximum bid, though advertisers can still win the auction with the lowest maximum bid by having the highest relevance.

How has cost per click changed over the years?

“Cost Inflation” is a term often sprouted by digital marketers as they worry about the increasing costs of running paid advertisements across platforms such as Google and Facebook. Whether that be pay-per-click search campaigns, image-based shopping ads or display campaigns on social media and popular blog sites, we are seeing a very similar trend: it is becoming more expensive to advertise. 

A study by Hochman Consultants looks at the average cost per clicks across 50 advertisers on the Google AdWords Network from 2005 to 2019, where the advertisers came from a range of industries. We can see that cost per click has been growing steadily over time, and in 14 years, the average cost per click is almost triple that of 2005. This study was conducted in the US, but we are seeing a similar trend across advertisers in the UK.

Like any competitive market, pricing is determined by supply and demand. When Google Ads first launched in 2000, there were 18 million searches per day worldwide. In 2019, there are around 5.6 billion searches a day worldwide—the equivalence of 63,000 searches every second. Not only is that 300x the search volume of when Google Ads first began; with growing capabilities of targeting, you are really able to whittle down which search queries you want to bid for based on location and for which demographic you want your ad to shown to. Also, the number of advertisers in digital marketing platforms are increasing, and spend for UK Paid Search media surpassed that of TV in 2015 becoming the most spent channel. 

How does cost per click differ across social media channels?

Facebook and Twitter are the cheapest to advertise in, with Instagram being double the cost. This is mainly due to a different ad format mix, where Instagram ads are more likely to be videos. LinkedIn is by far the most expensive to advertise in, as they offer a very niche audience of professionals, with filtering options to target job title, years of experience and company name for example.  

How can I lower my cost per click?

As mentioned earlier, cost per click factors in the quality of your ad in the Quality Score metric. In the example above, the advertiser willing to spend the least actually won the auction due to having a high-quality score. So how can you improve your quality score and therefore lower your cost per click?

• For Google Ads, ensure your ad is relevant to the keyword you are bidding for. If you are bidding for “hand sanitizer” but you really sell washing powder, you may need to rethink your keyword strategy.

• Make sure that your landing page is relevant for the ad. For example, a landing page with 100 different items to shop from including hand sanitizer wouldn’t work as well as a landing page that is only about hand sanitizer, because Google will deem the latter more relevant

• Optimize for click-through-rate. This is often the case with social media advertisement as well as Google Ads. Having a clear call-to-action and a good creative will help.

The final note is that historic performance of your account is taken into consideration when calculating cost per clicks, so take the time to make sure all ads are optimized as much as possible. With the info above, you should be well prepared to optimize toward success. Learn more about how we can help you now.

Previously, you’d have to turn to separate platforms to measure different types of data: Universal Analytics is focused on web analytics, while Firebase—the app development platform Google acquired in 2014—focused on apps and offered less robust reporting. What made working with both platforms challenging is that their data structures are altogether different (think Adobe Analytics vs Google Analytics), with variables and metrics that just don't line up.

Now joining web and app data together, GA4 is here to stay—and it’s time you began thinking ahead on how to implement it into your existing solutions. There’s no question as to whether you should migrate from UA to GA4; if you don’t set up GA4 now, you’ll lose the chance to collect that historical data. 

And while there are many new features and benefits to GA4, there’s one place in particular I recommend you begin with: dual tagging. Dual tagging means deploying GA4 parallel to your existing UA tags. Let’s run through some important points you should know as you get started integrating GA4 into your setup.

Start Out with Event Mapping

Most importantly, be aware that the current UA data model is built on sessions, whereas the new GA4 data model is built on events. That means to migrate your data from UA to GA4, you’re going to want to create an updated measurement plan which details the mapping of all important variables.

Essentially, all our trusted UA events will be mapped to GA4 events and event parameters. And all the legacy hit types like social, page view, transaction fall under an “event” in GA4. This makes the tracking more robust and allows you to report on all types of legacy data points in one report, because now they are all events.

Another point worth discussing is the death of the event category, action and label. Those are dead to you, adios amigos! Instead, your original event action now becomes the name of your event, while the event category and event label become parameters if you so choose (or not, if you’re using gtag.js).  

Left unattended, this could lead to a colossal data scramble, depending on your event action values, ie: “click.” In my experience with Dual Tagging, I often merge the event action and category as my event name and the event label slots into an event parameter with a more descriptive value than “event_label.” The GA4 events represent one action, so it can be more granular than the historical UA event, which at times encapsulates a range of actions. I’d recommend working with a partner like Media.Monks to discuss your measurement plan before your march ahead. Now is a great time to reset your data strategy and clean up your reporting. Write off the technical debt; you can’t break a dashboard that doesn’t exist. 

If you’re using gtag.js, note that once you implement GA4, your GTag code is automatically mapped to GA4, like this:

Setting Custom Dimensions

With that in mind, let’s dig a little deeper and take a look at our UA Custom Dimensions. You won't see “session” scope listed when you map custom dimensions—that scope does not currently exist. If you want to track user attributes, also called User Properties, they should be mapped to “Custom Dimensions, user scope.” And don’t get User Properties confused with Account Properties, which are two totally different things. (The naming could have been better on that one!)

There is also one new step in GA4: you have to map your custom dimensions in the GA4 UI.  Otherwise you won’t see the data in your reports.

Change Your Perception on Sessions

I also wanted to let you know that sessions themselves are now counted differently. A UTM parameter change won't start a new session! Nor will a late-night session that crosses over midnight. Sessions in GA4 are restarted only after 30 minutes of inactivity, just like in Universal Analytics. That means your session counts are going to be lower in GA4 if you try to compare reports directly to UA (don’t do that!).

Setting up Dual Tagging is a must, right now. Don’t delay in enabling that GA4 property.  It can all be done via the GA interface, and you can have pageviews and five other events firing out of the box (like scroll, downloads, exit links, internal search and YouTube interactions)! 

However, take your finger off the trigger before setting up your custom event tracking. We do not recommend directly mapping UA to GA4. You will need to carefully think through a new measurement plan, as mentioned above. It doesn’t mean you will start from scratch (although if you’ve wanted to do that, now is the perfect opportunity). There are a set of recommended events Google encourages you to use because future reporting and features will be based on them; for example, account signup is “sign_up.” If you don’t take time to think through how the data will appear in your reporting, along with the mapping and your variable quotas for the standard GA4, you could seriously regret your haste come six months.

The variable quota can be found in your GA4 dashboard if you can’t remember how many you’ve created:

And that’s it—you’ve taken your first steps in getting acquainted with GA4. Again, the suite solves the crucial challenge of aligning your web and app measurements, fueling insights everywhere your audience turns within your owned platforms. Setting up GA4 sooner rather than later will help you future proof and collect greater historical data, so don’t wait—but if you need some help, you know who to call!