Search Ads 360 RFP Template

Before You Issue a Search Ads 360 RFP

SA360's value over native Google Ads management is portfolio bidding across engines against your actual business goals — which means the engagement's core technical question is what signal the bidding optimizes toward. An RFP should make vendors specify the conversion architecture: which floodlights or imported conversions, whether values reflect margin or lifetime value rather than raw revenue, and how offline conversions flow back in.

Value-based bidding is where sophisticated partners separate from adequate ones. Ask what proportion of their managed spend runs on value rather than volume targets, and for a case where moving to value-based bidding changed business results, not just ROAS optics. Integration fluency — GA4 audiences, CM360 floodlights, merchant feeds — rounds out the technical scorecard.

What the Search Ads 360 Sections Cover

• Engine accounts in scope and their sync behaviour
• Conversion sources feeding each bid strategy
• Budget rules and who may override the automation
• Migration of labels, templates and business data
• Performance baselines set before any bid change
• Reporting reconciled with the engines' own numbers

Writing the Search Ads 360 Scope of Work

Scope the conversion architecture first, because everything the platform does follows from what it optimizes toward. State which conversion actions will be used for bidding, whether they come from floodlights, imported conversions or platform-native measurement, and critically whether they carry a value that reflects margin or long-term customer worth rather than headline revenue. If offline conversions matter because a sale completes in a call center, a branch or a contract weeks later, the scope must include the upload mechanism, its cadence, the identifier used to join, and who owns that pipeline when it fails.

State the account estate clearly. Which engines are managed, how many accounts and campaigns, which markets, and whether the underlying account structures are being restructured as part of this work or inherited as they are. Automated bidding behaves badly on fragmented account structures, so if restructuring is needed it should be a scoped workstream with its own acceptance rather than an assumption. Say who holds administrative access on the engine accounts, since engine-side changes are frequently the dependency that delays everything else.

Scope the business data and feeds you expect the platform to use. Inventory or product data driving templated campaigns, business data tables used for labeling and reporting, and any audience lists being applied all need a source, a refresh frequency and an owner. Budget management deserves a line: state whether budgets are managed centrally through the platform, how reallocation between campaigns and markets is authorised, and what the escalation is when pacing diverges. These are process decisions that determine who can act, not settings.

Define done in terms of the bidding system behaving as designed on your data. Reasonable criteria: conversion actions and values are reconciled against the source system within a stated tolerance, bid strategies have completed a learning period with documented performance against a pre-agreed baseline, offline conversions are landing at the expected rate with a monitored failure alert, and reporting separates genuine efficiency improvement from mix shift. Out of scope should include creative production, landing page work and any organic search activity unless you name them.

Requirements That Actually Separate Search Ads 360 Proposals

• Value definition — require a written position on what value is attached to each conversion action and where that number comes from, since bidding toward the wrong value optimizes efficiently in the wrong direction.
• Offline conversion pipeline — ask how offline results are joined and uploaded, what the expected lag is, how the bidding strategy is configured to tolerate that lag, and what alerts when the upload stops.
• Structural readiness assessment — require an assessment of whether your current account structure supports portfolio bidding, and an explicit statement of what would have to be restructured before automation can work properly.
• Mix shift controls — ask how they distinguish genuine performance improvement from a shift of spend toward brand and high-intent terms, and what reporting makes that distinction visible to your leadership.
• Learning period management — require a description of how changes are sequenced so that bid strategies are not reset repeatedly, and what they consider a stable period long enough to judge a change on.
• Cross-engine handling — where more than one engine is managed, ask how goals and budgets are balanced between them and what evidence they use to shift allocation.
• Audience and feed dependencies — require each audience list and data feed the bidding depends on to be named with its refresh cadence and owner, since stale feeds degrade bidding silently.

Common Mistakes in Search Ads 360 RFPs

• ✕ Bidding toward raw revenue when margin or LTV is what the business actually wants more of.
• ✕ Portfolio strategies configured once and never revisited as goals and seasonality shift.
• ✕ Offline and imported conversions excluded, so bidding optimizes on half the picture.
• ✕ SA360 layered onto accounts whose underlying structure makes automation thrash.
• ✕ Reporting ROAS improvements that are really mix shifts toward brand terms.

• ✕ Scoping bid management without ownership of the conversion tracking itself, so the team responsible for performance cannot fix the signal they are being judged on.
• ✕ Building the value model on last-click revenue because it is available, when the business cares about margin and repeat purchase, and then treating the resulting optimization as a measurement problem rather than a scoping one.
• ✕ Ignoring the seasonality of your category in the scope, so bid strategies are evaluated over a window that includes a trading peak and the conclusions drawn are about the calendar rather than the work.
• ✕ Assuming feeds and product data are ready when the merchant data has gaps in availability, pricing or identifiers, which produces campaigns that bid on items that cannot be sold.

Questions Worth Asking Search Ads 360 Vendors

1. What signal architecture do you recommend for us — which conversions, values, and offline imports?
2. What share of your managed spend runs value-based bidding, and show a result it changed.
3. How do you decide portfolio structure, and how often do you restructure as goals move?
4. How do you guard against automation chasing brand-term mix shifts and calling it performance?
5. Show how you integrate GA4 audiences and CM360 floodlights into search bidding.

How to Weight the Search Ads 360 Evaluation

Weight measurement design above campaign management craft. The platform's advantage over native engine management is portfolio optimization against your real business goals, and that advantage evaporates entirely if the conversion signal is wrong. Proposals that spend more effort on the signal architecture than on the bidding tactics are addressing the thing that determines whether automation helps or simply accelerates a mistake.

Score analytical honesty about attribution and incrementality heavily. Search is where the difference between measured and incremental performance is largest, because a meaningful share of the conversions counted would have happened anyway. A vendor who raises this unprompted, proposes a way to test it and accepts being judged on business outcomes rather than reported return is worth more than one presenting impressive platform metrics.

Give weight to the willingness to tell you when the platform is not the answer. For accounts below a certain complexity, portfolio management adds administrative overhead without adding decisions that native automation would not make. A vendor who is clear about where the value comes from in your specific situation, and where it does not, is demonstrating the judgment you will rely on when the recommendations get harder.