The landscape of search advertising for enterprise organisations has reached a critical juncture. The old playbook, which prioritised granular, manual control, is now untenable. This approach is overwhelmed by the sheer scale and complexity of modern customer journeys and cross-channel campaigns.
A new playbook is required; one that moves beyond the tactical and embraces a strategic, unified approach. At Brainlabs, we’re pioneering this new approach, which positions Search Ads 360 as the architectural foundation for an intelligent, scalable, and profitable paid search ecosystem.
Enterprise Bidding in Search Ads 360 typically includes one of the below options:
I. The Old Playbook: The Enterprise Bidding Dilemma
Old methods are no longer sufficient to meet modern business objectives. The challenges of enterprise-scale paid search are now fundamentally about three core dilemmas:
IA. The Scale Problem: From Complexity to Chaos
Enterprise campaigns are sprawling and intricate. The manual effort required to manage thousands of campaigns, ad groups, and keywords across multiple platforms and geographies is a significant drain on resources. This operational friction and slow pace, often compounded by legacy systems, prevents marketers from focusing on high-level strategic work like audience development and market analysis.
IB. Data Disconnect: Why Single Campaign-Bidding is a Losing Game
Traditional campaign-level bidding is flawed for the modern customer journey. It enforces a siloed view, fragmenting data across individual campaigns and channels (Search, P-Max, Shopping, Demand Gen, etc),and relies on single-point attribution (typically last click). This prevents holistic understanding of the user journey and ensures campaigns are at a competitive disadvantage in real-time auctions.
IC. The Myth of Control: A Mindset Shift is Overdue
Managing performance marketing campaigns is not just a technical or operational problem; it is also a conceptual one. Paid search practitioners have generally believed that maximum granularity and manual control are the hallmarks of a well-managed account. The thinking is that by controlling every individual keyword & bid, the marketer maintains a level of precision that guarantees the best performance, and that an algorithm couldn’t previously match. However, this is a dangerous illusion. A hyper-segmented, manual optimisation structure constrains performance, limiting the ability to find a globally optimal solution.
A focus on optimising for a single campaign or a small group of keywords – a “local” optimum – prevents the entire portfolio from reaching its full potential. The inherent fragmentation of this approach means that marketers often miss opportunities to reallocate budget from underperforming campaigns to high-potential ones, as the analysis and adjustments are done in isolation. SA360’s portfolio strategies were specifically designed to break these artificial constraints, balancing performance across an entire group of campaigns to achieve the best overall business result.
II. The New Frontier: Search Ads 360 as the Bidding Architect
As the challenges of the old playbook mount, a new solution emerges. SA360 is not just a tool to manage search campaigns; it is a fundamental re-architecture of a large enterprise’s bidding and optimisation needs. It empowers marketers to deploy proactive strategies that harness their business’ complexity, turning it from an overhead into a bottom-line business result.
SA360 is an industry leading search management platform with its unique features of: Consolidated Portfolio Bid Strategies, and Budget Bid Strategies. Portfolio bid strategies are automated bidding strategies that group multiple campaign types or campaigns across multiple engines to manage their bids collectively toward a shared performance goal, such as maximising conversions or meeting a target-ROAS.
Cross-Engine campaigns were historically managed across different bidding strategies; while Enterprise Bidding may combine under one strategy:
Portfolio Bid Strategies may manage campaigns of multiple types, such as across Paid Search and Performance Max:
The other key element for Enterprise Bidding in SA360 is Budget Bid Strategies, but we will cover them in detail later on.
A. Unified Portfolio Bidding, Unconstrained Performance
SA360 offers unified campaign management across multiple engines and paid search channels, providing a holistic view of performance and cross-channel impact.
This unification is critical for two strategic benefits:
- Smarter Decisions: It brings previously unconnected data points together, preventing double-attribution and enabling clearer business decisions.
- AI Optimisation: It creates the necessary conditions for AI-powered bid and budget optimisation. AI-powered features with SA360 allow users to find incremental performance that directly drives your specific business objectives by leveraging the diversity across accounts (such as different campaign types, multiple product categories, or even across multiple countries or markets).
In a worked example, the platform may increase bids and spend for a high-performing campaign while decreasing them for a lower-performing one to ensure the total portfolio hits its target-CPA or target-ROAS. This counter-intuitive, data-driven approach demonstrates why a mindset shift from manual control to strategic oversight is long overdue.
Google have seen success from Enterprise Bidding:
“Typically, advertisers that adopt Search Ads 360 multi-channel / engine optimization portfolios can expect to see 5% more conversions or conversion value as compared to optimizing channels and engines independently.”
Beyond Performance Gains
The objective is to group campaigns that share a common business goal – such as a similar line of business, comparable margins, or shared ROAS/ CPA targets. This unified approach allows the algorithm to operate on a portfolio-level objective, freeing it from campaign-specific constraints. This matters because it allows SA360’s machine learning models to maximise the total outcome.
In addition to superior performance gains, consolidated portfolios deliver several foundational benefits:
Target Accuracy: More data equals better accuracy. By operating at scale, the portfolio increases the confidence of bidding predictions, resulting in a higher likelihood of hitting your target CPA/ ROAS consistently.
Faster Reactions: A consolidated portfolio provides a larger, richer dataset, enabling the system to react more quickly and confidently to real-time market signals and performance shifts than siloed campaigns ever could.
Flexibility & Control: Users gain more control over the bidding system. This allows you to strategically steer the system towards desired outcomes (e.g., using margin-based inputs or weighting specific conversions), guiding the AI rather than just accepting its decisions.
Simplicity at Scale: Managing bids and budgets across multiple engines becomes easier and more cohesive. This increased efficiency frees up valuable time for marketers to focus on strategic, high-value activities that truly drive business growth.
Taking Enterprise Bidding One Step Further: Multi-target Portfolio Bid Strategies
Multi-target Portfolio Bid Strategies are a brand new (Q3 2025) and unique SA360 feature which offers advanced, AI-powered bidding strategies that group multiple standard bid portfolios (sub-portfolios) to optimise towards a single performance goal, such as target-ROAS or target-CPA, while simultaneously allowing individual targets and acceptable performance ranges for each sub-portfolio within the group.
This feature, like Multiple-target-CPA or Multiple-target-ROAS, allows SA360 to dynamically shift bids and budget across different campaign groups (even across search engines) to maximise the overall group’s performance, while still respecting the specific efficiency constraints of each campaign segment.
For example, for a portfolio with a target CPA of £10, SA360 might allow one campaign to bid for a £12 CPA conversion while another achieves an £8 CPA, provided the aggregate portfolio goal is met. This strategic allocation of spend ensures resources are automatically shifted to areas of highest potential.
B. Budget Bid Strategies
Budget Bid Strategies automatically manage and optimise campaign budgets and bids across a plan’s date range to maximise a key metric (such as target-ROAS or target-CPA) while staying within a target spend amount. Their primary focus is to efficiently spend the assigned budget over a specific time period, making daily adjustments to budgets and bids as needed.
Reading up on BBS from Google, whose learning includes: “Typically, advertisers with budget constrained campaigns who adopt a Search Ads 360 budget bid strategy can get up to 10% more conversions or conversions value at a similar spend and ROI.”
III. A Case Study in Transformation
Anglian Homes Improvements
The Challenge
After nearly 60 years in the UK home improvements industry, Anglian needed to accelerate growth through Search while maintaining category-specific ROAS and improving performance in key regions.
The Approach
Anglian, in partnership with Brainlabs, moved from segmented target ROAS/ tCPA campaigns to an Enterprise Bidding structure.
- Unified Bidding: We consolidated their Search and Performance Max campaigns for the Windows category into larger, single tROAS portfolios to maximise bidding efficacy across channels.
- Regional Segmentation: We updated the Performance Max structure from catch-all campaigns to regional segmentation to focus on key areas.
This phased rollout mitigated risk while allowing them to test and validate the new portfolio structure.
The Results
The adoption of Enterprise Bidding delivered dramatic growth and efficiency while scaling budgets:
– 95% growth in Conversion Value
– 51% increase in Conversions
– 45% higher ROAS
IV. The Modern Marketer: From Operator to Strategist
The evolution of enterprise bidding in Search Ads 360 marks a significant and irreversible shift in the role of the paid search professional. The old playbook, with its reliance on manual control and siloed data, has been rendered obsolete by the scale and complexity of modern marketing. A new path, powered by machine learning and unified platforms, is now the only way to truly unlock business growth.
Your New Role is Communication
The central premise of this new era is that the enterprise marketer’s job is no longer to manually pull tactical levers but to act as a “strategic communicator” for the algorithm. The responsibility has shifted from the tactical to the strategic. The marketer is now tasked with defining clear, data-driven business objectives and translating them into signals that the SA360 platform can use to optimise toward a globally optimal solution.
This new role requires a different skill set; one that emphasises data analysis, audience segmentation, and high-level campaign architecture over the minutiae of manual bid adjustments. How can marketers ensure they create the right and most performant portfolios, plus the appropriate targets for them, and iterate at the right cadence (i.e. not too often, as too many changes may hinder the bidding algorithms).
Final Takeaways
Enterprise bidding is now a race, and the winners are orchestrating, not optimising. The only way to unlock truly unconstrained performance is by utilising the full, unified power of SA360’s AI.
