This guide is designed to help you prepare for your upgrade to the new Search Ads 360 and includes recommended best practices to facilitate the automated migration of your inventory management and ad builder templates to a similar feature, called Templates, in the new Search Ads 360.
Note that these recommendations are optional. The migration will happen whether or not you complete the following actions.
About automated migration of inventory management and ad builder templates to the new Search Ads 360
Before your templates can be migrated, you must agree to upgrade your Search Ads 360 bid strategies and budget management. Automated migration of inventory management and ad builder templates will occur with 30-day notice after the migration of all relevant formula columns, custom dimensions, and bid strategies is completed. After automated migration is complete, you can create templates in the new ;Search Ads 360. Some settings and templates won't be included in the automated migration and will need to be manually re-created as needed.
Recommended actions to optimize automatic migration
1. Review settings that could pause templates
Templates with the following settings may be paused after migration:
- Campaign or ad group templates with formulas that reference feed or formula columns in the Start Date or End Date settings
- Campaign templates that use Campaign goals
- Campaign templates that use unsupported bid strategies, such as formula-weighted conversion bid strategies
- Draft ads, which aren’t supported in the new Search Ads 360 and will migrate as paused
If templates are affected by these settings, review suggested actions to ensure templates aren't paused post-migration.
2. Check for associations with inactive, empty, or removed templates, feeds, and accounts
Templates in the following scenarios won’t be automatically migrated:
- Templates associated with removed inventory plans
- Plans and templates that reference inactive engine accounts
- Plans and templates associated with inactive feeds
- Templates associated with feeds that include empty columns
- Templates that haven't been updated in more than 365 days
- Active or paused templates associated with feed data that hasn't been updated in more than 365 days
If you want active or paused templates affected by the above scenarios to be automatically migrated to the new Search Ads 360, remove any associations to inactive plans, templates, or engines, or review suggested actions to ensure templates can be migrated.
3. Check for dependencies on custom conversions or formula columns
As part of your upgrade to the new Search Ads 360, formula columns and custom conversions automatically will be copied to a similar feature called custom columns. Errors in the migration of formula columns and custom conversions will also prevent associated templates from being automatically migrated.
Take these actions to troubleshoot common custom column sync errors:
- Avoid unsupported functions, such as has_label, mid, bmm, regex_match, and is_error.
- Avoid unsupported column types, such as Transaction quantity, Action quantity, Avg pos, and First page bid (current).
- Avoid referencing more than 5 custom columns.
- Review columns with nested references.
- Remove columns that aren’t useful or actively used.
There may be other types of custom column sync errors. In some cases, it might not be possible for the new Search Ads 360 to automatically copy and sync a formula column to a custom column. Learn how to fix sync errors with formula columns and custom columns.
4. Check for dependencies on business data
As part of your upgrade to the new Search Ads 360, business data will migrate to a similar feature called custom dimensions. Errors in the migration of business data will also prevent associated templates from being automatically migrated.
To help prevent common errors, take these actions:
- Remove columns from business data tables that reference other business data tables. Instead, directly associate the desired values from the referenced tables to your campaign entities.
- Remove business event columns from business data tables.
If you have templates affected by this functionality, learn how to update template configuration to take advantage of migration automation.
5. Update unsupported templates and filters
Templates will not be migrated to the new Search Ads 360 if they use unsupported functionality. Some unsupported functions or template types can be updated to take advantage of automatic migration. Take the following actions to unblock auto-migration for affected templates:
- Remove the “Creation timestamp” feed filter. This feed filter isn't supported in the new Search Ads 360, and templates that use this feed filter won't be migrated to the new Search Ads 360.
- Migrate Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising expanded text ads (ETA) templates to responsive search ad templates (RSA).
Learn how to migrate ad builder and inventory management expanded text ad templates to RSA templates.
6. Review settings to re-create after migration
Some template types and settings aren't included in the automatic migration, and some template types aren't supported in the new Search Ads 360, but alternative template types exist. If you want to continue to use these templates or settings in the new Search Ads 360, you will need to re-create them or their alternatives after your bid strategies are upgraded:
- Email notification settings for campaign and ad group templates
- Sitelink templates
- As an alternative to location templates, which aren't supported in the new Search Ads 360, you can configure location as part of Campaign templates.
- As an alternative to expanded text ads (ETA) templates for Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising, which aren't supported in the new Search Ads 360, you can configure Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising RSA templates.
Learn more about suggested actions to address migration for functionality that's not auto-migrated.
7. Learn about how Templates functionality in the new Search Ads 360 experience differs from ad builder and inventory management in the previous Search Ads 360
Templates combine, and improve upon, inventory management and ad builder functionality from the previous Search Ads 360, and some of these differences impact templates and the content managed by templates in a way that may be different from behavior you’re used to in the previous Search Ads 360. You may want to review your workflow or processes to prevent possible unexpected or unintended results that may occur as a result of these changes.
Learn more about Templates in the new Search Ads 360 or functionality in which behavior has changed.