What is Google Ads Campaign Manager 360?

Get to know the powerful features of Campaign Manager 360 to determine if it’s right for your digital marketing plan.

Here, you’ll find:

• How Campaign Manager 360 works
• Campaign Manager 360’s most powerful features
• How to integrate Campaign Manager 360 with the full Google Marketing platform
• Tips to get started

Google is synonymous with searching for anything you might need (information, products, services, etc.) and finding it instantly. That’s the true influence of Google and Google products. 

Google Campaign Manager 360 is one such product. It’s an enterprise-level platform that makes running marketing campaigns a (relative) breeze. 

Not convinced you should make Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords) and their new Google Campaign Manager 360 part of your digital marketing strategy? Let’s talk about a few vital stats. 

Did you know the median click-through rate (CTR) for the first paid position on the search engine results pages (SERPs) is 2.1%? This may rival the CTR of organic positions in the first 10 results, but paid ads allow you to get there and stay there.

Plus, it should be no surprise that 78% of global businesses focus their advertising budgets on Google Ads. But it’s also true that, as businesses grow, managing digital campaigns becomes more complex. Luckily Google has a tool to help you out. 

What is Google Campaign Manager 360?

According to Google itself, Campaign Manager 360 is a powerful tool that simplifies campaign management for Google Ads. From media planning to reporting, you can view all of your ad campaign efforts on one powerful and easy-to-use platform. You can then work smarter, act faster, and get improved results from your Google Ads.

Campaign Manager 360 was formerly known as Campaign Manager and, before that, DoubleClick. The tool is Google’s own platform and gives advertisers a management and measurement system for their ads.

The core feature of Campaign Manager 360 is an ad server, which essentially gives advertisers (like you) a centralized platform for hosting, managing, and serving their ads. 

Campaign Manager 360 also offers extensive tracking and analytics, as well as automated third-party verification. The centralized hub aspect of the platform gives your business a step up. That’s because it lets you more easily capitalize on and have full visibility into your ad campaign metrics.

Armed with that info, you can optimize your campaign assets to improve performance across all your campaigns, from ad copy to landing pages and user experience (UX).

It’s an extensive tool, so let’s dive into the main features and their benefits. 

Key benefits of Google Ads Campaign Manager 360

Unified, enterprise-scale campaign management 

CMOs at enterprise-level organizations are looking for an integrated technology stack – and that’s exactly what Campaign Manager 360 offers. It works in harmony with the rest of the Google Marketing Platform and makes it simple to manage your cross-channel campaigns.

Campaign Manager 360 integrates with:

• Display & Video 360 (DV360)
• Search Ads 360 (SA360)
• Google Analytics 360 

You can create and manage the other Google Marketing Platform products using Campaign Manager 360. They can also be tracked and analyzed through Floodlight activities, which, as Google explains, “correspond to specific events you’d like to track, such as conversions on your website or adding users to audience lists.”

With a unified platform, enterprise marketers save time and resources, rather than switching between numerous tools. You can become more efficient by creating seamless workflows and getting a bird’s-eye view of your campaigns. 

Data-driven creative 

Many advertisers will tell you one of their biggest headaches is trying to find actionable insights from the huge volume of data they receive from their campaigns. 

The human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than textual information, according to the University of Minnesota. This makes data visualization a powerful tool for creating impactful campaigns and improving ROI. 

The integration of Google Campaign Manager 360 with Google Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) gives you the power to generate data-driven creative. Your marketing team can create personalized ads at scale by integrating your data into the creative displayed with your ads.

Campaign Manager 360 gives you data on your ads, such as impressions, clicks, conversions, and ad spend. The categories are:

• Campaigns
• Advertisers
• Placements
• Creatives
• Devices
• Geographies

By generating this data into colorful and easy-to-understand dashboards, you can quickly gain insights from your campaigns and share this information with your team and stakeholders. 

You can also keep working to improve the creativity of your ads based on A/B testing. Approximately 70% of ad success is driven by the creative, so once you nail this, you will be on the path to Google Ads domination. 

Advanced modeling and data-driven attribution

In Google Campaign Manager 360, your data and reports are collected together. If you’ve ever struggled to attribute revenue across channels, you know how helpful aggregated data can be.

With Campaign Manager 360, you can give conversion credit across channels to help you organize your business’s ad spend more effectively. Drive greater efficiency in your ad performance and leverage advanced data models to drive more accurate attribution. 

What features does Campaign Manager 360 offer?

Now we’ve looked at the key benefits of Google Campaign Manager, let’s dive into the features that deliver those benefits. 

Google Campaign Manager offers a wide range of features. By understanding the ins and outs of the platform, you can effectively manage your time and resources by focusing on the features that will help deliver the best results for your unique ad campaigns. 

Centralized tracking

Campaign Manager 360 uses the Floodlight tracking pixel. This lets you track conversions and sales. You can also add your data from digital channels and create a single view of your campaign performance.

Trafficking

The Trafficking features let you manage and run ads in a way that helps align your ad campaigns with your business’s larger marketing goals, objectives, and track your KPIs. 

It’s a pretty extensive element of the platform, so here are some useful ways you can get started:

• Trafficking workflow: Get a fully comprehensive view of the campaign management process.
• Start Trafficking: Go through the basic steps to create campaigns, ad placements, and creative.
• Edit creatives: Discover the different creative types you can use for your campaigns and edit them to suit your needs. 

Attribution Modeling

The data-driven attribution in Campaign Manager 360 is run by a powerful modeling tool. It enables you to compare different attribution models to more accurately attribute conversion to campaigns based on how your business manages its ads. 

Attribution models that you get with the tool include:

• Last and first interaction
• Linear 
• Time decay

These models ensure your channels are assigned accurate values. You learn the role that specific channels have played in your conversions. You can then continue to invest your ad spend in the ones delivering the best ROI.

View channels outside the Google ecosystem

We’ve talked a lot about the Google Marketing Platform integration. But what about channels that are outside Google’s ecosystem? 

You can measure those too. Campaign Manager 360 gives you features that enable you to bring all your digital data into the platform, such as social, email, and SMS. You can do this through either the click and impression trackers or an additional integration. 

Centralize audiences

Campaign Manager 360 gives businesses the option to create their own first-party audiences. You can then use these in the media buying platforms (Display & Video 360 and Search Ads 360).

Verification

One of the most valuable features of Campaign Manager 360 is its verification. Why should your business care about verification? Because it stops you from throwing money away on ads no one sees or that are displayed to irrelevant audiences. 

Tracking and verifying ads building trust and transparency between your business (the advertiser) and publishers. You can have peace of mind knowing that your ads are displayed with vetted publishers and in the correct brand-safe location.

With the verification feature, you can verify your ads and the chosen tags to ensure the right audiences see your campaigns.

Google verification includes excellent spam filtering and fraud detection, so your ad spend never goes on fraudulent impressions. The content labels and classifiers then give you full control of your tracking. You decide where to serve or not serve your ads using a movie-like rating system. 

You can also track the type of content to serve or not serve ads close to, which prevents your brand from being associated with unwanted topics such as politics, gambling, or tobacco.

Reporting

If you work in marketing, you probably love a good report. Having your campaign data neatly displayed in an easy-to-digest report makes it easy to assess how well your strategy is performing and make the necessary adjustments. 

Campaign Manager 360 reporting has all the reporting elements you want, and they are exactly where you want them to be. The features enable you to view your data for ads trafficked through the platform and organize their performance data in the most useful way. You have a bunch of options to choose from and can make your reports as simple or complex as you need.                  

The summary tab in the reporting features is the best place to start. It gives you an overview of your campaign performance.  

You can also go into the Report Builder, where you can create custom reports. Options include:

• Standard
• Floodlight
• Path to Conversion (P2C)
• Reach
• Cross-Dimension Reach 
• And more 

Integration with Google Marketing Platform

We’ve already mentioned that Campaign Manager 360 is just one platform in the wider Google Marketing Platform stack. Let’s dive deep into what all of the possible integrations look like and when you would want to use them.

The Google Marketing Platform’s features can be used in isolation. However, when businesses use the full stack (Display & Video 360, Analytics 360, and Search Ads 360), Campaign Manager 360 becomes the central hub for tracking, audiences, and reporting. 

Display & Video 360

Integrate with Display & Video 360 to streamline your Google Ads campaign management. You get a faster setup and seamless synchronization between platforms to give you a comprehensive overview of your ads.

Analytics 360

Get a full picture of the customer journey by integrating with Analytics 360. This integration gives you a complete customer view and the ability to analyze Campaign Manager 360 data in Google Analytics. 

Some of the advantages of this integration include:

• Campaign Manager 360 reports in the Acquisition section of Analytics – data from these reports include impressions, clicks, and view- and click-through sessions
• Acquisition reports that separate Campaign Manager 360-trafficked Display advertising
• Multi-Channel Funnels and Attribution reports that show you Display clicks and impressions

Search Ads 360

A Search Ads 360 integration lets you view your Search ad data right next to your Display and Ads data for a comprehensive view of ad campaigns.

Every Search Ads 360 advertiser and its associated Campaign Manager 360 account share their Floodlight settings, activities, and tags. You can then track conversions on both the Display and Search networks with the same tags. 

How do I get access to Campaign Manager 360?

Campaign Manager 360 is a ‘premium’ platform, so you don’t hear about it as much as Google Ads Manager. It’s typically aimed at enterprise businesses with large ad spends. 

There are two ways your business can get access to the platform.

Directly through Google: 

If you have a large enough ad spend, your businesses may qualify to purchase the platform directly from Google. However, it’s not as simple as just adding to cart and getting started. To ensure that you’re using it correctly, you’ll need to work with one of Google’s implementation partners.

Through a reseller: 

In the U.S., several Google partners are authorized to sell the 360 platform. When you purchase the platform from a reseller, they hold the contract. This can be transferred later if your business becomes eligible to buy directly from Google.

Notes from our own pay-per-click (PPC) expert

We wanted a marketing pro’s POV on Campaign Manager 360, so we consulted with Katherine Kiraly, one of our seasoned SEM pros. Here’s what she thinks potential users and marketing managers should know about the platform.

• This is a paid, enterprise-level service from Google for large companies spending millions a month on Google and other platforms.
• You receive a dedicated Google Vendor team that helps implement certain things. They will pull reports for you and suggest keywords to implement. They are salespeople, so their main goal is to get you to spend more on Google. 
• It’s a one-stop shop for managing and optimizing all of your ads from Google to Microsoft Advertising (formerly Bing) to Facebook and LinkedIn.
• You can create values for down-funnel conversions (past lead inquiry) that you can optimize for across platforms using CPA (target cost per acquisition) or tROAS (target return on ad spend) bid strategies.
• You can create budget-based bidding strategies to add your campaign verticals so that you are sure to spend your forecasted budget. 
• SA360’s automated bidding strategies are more robust than just Google Ads. According to Google, “by leveraging SA360 automated bidding with Google Ads auction-time bidding, advertisers can create a super-powered bidding solution to fit their exact needs.”
• It allows you to use Google’s Data-Driven Attribution across all platforms you run ads on Microsoft Advertising, as well as social media apps like LinkedIn and Facebook/Instagram.

The takeaway

Google Ads management takes expertise, attention to detail, and regular monitoring to be truly successful. Campaign Manager 360 makes it simpler. Quality management of your ads with full visibility across channels lets you create informed strategies that lead to higher ROI – and who doesn’t want that?

See the benefits of a platform like this but don’t have time to add yet another task to your to-do list? That’s why we’re here. Our team of dedicated senior-level marketing scientists are ready to partner with you to take your paid search program to the next level – connect with us to find out how.