Budget bid strategies replace monthly spend bid strategies

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:

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.

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.