Budget bid strategies replace monthly spend bid strategies

Monthly spend bid strategies have been replaced by budget bid strategies, which can optimize monthly budgets for groups of campaigns. The migration schedule varies by goal type.

Milestone	Conversions or revenue (ROI) goal	Clicks goal
No new monthly spend bid strategies	Completed (April 2019)	Completed (August 2019)
Auto migration to budget management	Completed (April 2019)	Completed (August 2019)
Review and enable new budget bid strategies	Completed (May 2019)	Completed (November 2019)
Monthly spend bid strategies paused	Completed (May 2019)	Completed (November 18, 2019)

 

No new monthly spend bid strategies: You won't be able to create an ROI or clicks bid strategy that targets a specific monthly amount. Additionally, you won't be able to add any new entities to existing clicks goal strategies.

Auto migration to budget management: Where eligible, we’ll automatically migrate your monthly spend campaigns to budget management with budget plans targeting the same goal type. The new budget plans do not automatically have budget bid strategies enabled.

Review and enable new budget bid strategies: We recommend reviewing your budget groups and budget plans and enabling your new budget bid strategies as soon as possible to ensure a smooth transition.

Monthly spend bid strategies paused: Your monthly spend bid strategies are automatically paused. You won’t be able to reactivate them. The migrated entities associated with budget groups and plans that did not have budget bid strategies enabled will resort to manual bidding.

Migration options

You have two options for migrating from monthly spend bid strategies to budget bid strategies.

1. Migrate by manually creating items (recommended). To get an early start and to ensure your budget bid strategies are configured the way you want, we recommend that you manually create your own budget groups, goals, and plans. Ideally, you should do this before auto migration starts (see the table above for dates). This will prevent Search Ads 360 from creating items automatically.
2. Migrate using automatically created items. If you're unable to migrate manually, you can wait for Search Ads 360 to automatically create items for you. You'll still need to review and enable the new budget bid strategies.

Migrate using automatically created items

To help you migrate to using budget bid strategies to manage your monthly spend, Search Ads 360 created the following items for you in Budget Management. 

• Budget group: a container for groups of campaigns from supported search engines.
• Conversion goal: identifies the conversions used to estimate and optimize spend if you enable a budget bid strategy in a budget plan. The goal and conversion source are inherited from the monthly spend bid strategy.
• Recurring budget plan: sets a start date for the monthly recurring plan, budget, and goal for the spend. Budget bid strategies can only be enabled in budget plans. 
  A budget bid strategy isn't enabled in any of the new recurring budget plans because you are required to review the campaigns in the new budget groups and all of the conversion goal and budget plan settings before you use a budget bid strategy to automate spend. Learn more about budget bid strategies.

Automatically "Generated by SA360"  

The name of each new item is an eponym of the monthly spend bid strategy with "Generated by SA360" appended. For example, for a monthly spend bid strategy named, "ROAS Brand", each new item will be named as follows:

New item	Name
Budget group	ROAS Brand(Generated by SA360)
Conversion goal	ROAS Brand(Generated by SA360)
Budget bid strategy (if enabled)	ROAS Brand(Generated by SA360  Δ)

Overview of steps to review generated budget groups and budget plans

1. Verify that the generated budget groups in Budget Management contain the campaigns you want.
   Compare the campaigns in your monthly spend bid strategy to the campaigns in the generated budget groups.

   • Navigate to a bid strategy and then click the Campaigns tab. 

2. Review each generated recurring monthly budget plan.

   Alternatively, you can click View budget plans in the yellow notification message that appears when you open Search Ads 360. 
   1. Select the checkbox next to a recurring monthly budget plan.
   2. Click Edit, and then click Edit details.
   3. Optional. Select a different start date. 
   4. View the generated conversion goal's settings.
   5. Review the target spend for the month.
   6. Enable the budget bid strategy. 
      When you enable the budget bid strategy, all of the campaigns that were managed by the monthly spend bid strategy are moved to the budget bid strategy. 
   7. Finish reviewing the budget plan settings, and then click Save.

Compare performance with Floodlight conversions

You can compare the performance of a monthly spend bid strategy that uses Floodlight conversions and the new budget bid strategy by adding the budget plan's conversion goal column to the bid strategy report.

1. Navigate to the Overview tab of a monthly spend bid strategy.
2. Add the conversion goal column (bid strategy name(Generated by SA360)) to the report. 

You can't add Google Analytics conversion columns to bid strategy reports.

Manually create budget groups, goals, and plans

If Search Ads 360 didn't create a budget group, conversion goal, and recurring budget plan for each of your monthly spend bid strategies, you can manually create one or all of the items. For example, Search Ads 360 created the budget group, but didn't create the accompanying conversion goal or the budget plan.

Overview of steps to create budget groups and budget plans

1. Identify the monthly spend bid strategy that you want to migrate.

   1. Navigate to an advertiser.

   2. In the left navigation panel, click Bid strategies.

   3. Click the Bid strategies tab.
   4. Filter the report to include only "monthly spend target" bid strategies.
   5. Note the name of a monthly spend bid strategy.
      You will enter the name later when you create a budget group to filter the list of campaigns.
2. Create a budget group in Budget management.
   • On the "Create budget group" page, in the "Add campaigns to budget group" section, filter the list to include only the campaigns managed by a monthly spend bid strategy.
3. Create a recurring budget plan.
   1. Create a new goal or use an existing goal.
   2. Set the monthly budget.
   3. Create a budget bid strategy.
   4. Complete setting up the budget plan, and then click Save.