Search Ads 360 has no pricing page. Go looking and you'll find product tours, a partner directory, and a contact form. That is deliberate, and it tells you most of what you need to know about the product: it isn't sold, it's scoped. Somebody from Google or a reseller gets on a call, asks what you spend across Google, Microsoft, and everything else, asks how many markets and how many people will need seats, and comes back with a number that is mostly a function of your media budget. Two companies buying the same software in the same quarter can pay very different amounts, and neither one finds that out.
I ran an account inside SA360 for about eighteen months, on the agency side, for a client who had bought it before I arrived. What I remember is not the bid engine. It's the Floodlight tags, the feed-driven inventory campaigns nobody wanted to touch, and the fact that a simple structural change took three days because it had to be pushed through the platform rather than done in the Google Ads UI. The software did what it promised. The client was paying a platform fee, an agency fee, and the salary of the one person who knew how the whole thing was wired, to manage roughly $180k a month across two engines. When they eventually dropped Microsoft, nobody could explain what they were still buying.
So this is the honest version of the cost conversation: how SA360 pricing is actually structured, the four line items that never show up in the quote, a rough total cost of ownership at three spend levels, and the short checklist that separates companies who genuinely need it from companies who bought enterprise software to feel like an enterprise. I work at groas, which sells autonomous Google Ads management and competes for some of the same budget, so discount the last section accordingly. The first three sections would read the same if I still worked at an agency.
SA360 is a management layer that sits on top of ad accounts you already own. You still have a Google Ads account. You still have a Microsoft Advertising account. SA360 connects to them, pulls the data into one place, applies its own bid strategies across all of them, and tracks conversions with Floodlight, the same tag system used by Campaign Manager 360 and Display & Video 360. That last part matters more than the bidding. Floodlight is the reason big advertisers stay: one conversion measurement layer across search, display, and video, with attribution that doesn't depend on three platforms each claiming the same sale. If you're only running Google Ads, you've just described an expensive way to get a worse version of the interface you already have.
The other real capabilities are inventory-driven campaigns, which build and update thousands of ad groups off a product or location feed, and cross-engine budget management, which shifts money between Google and Microsoft against a shared target. Both solve genuine problems at genuine scale: a hotel chain with 4,000 properties, a retailer with 90,000 SKUs, an airline running eleven countries in six languages. Neither solves a problem that a $30k-a-month single-engine advertiser has. I've sat in demos where the inventory feed module got fifteen minutes of airtime for a client with 40 products.
There is no list price, and there hasn't been one for years. SA360 is sold either directly by Google or through an authorized Google Marketing Platform reseller, and the fee is almost always a percentage of the media spend you run through the platform. The range I've seen quoted and heard from other operators sits somewhere between a fraction of a percent and roughly 3%, with the rate falling as spend rises. Volume is the whole negotiation. Below a certain spend level you don't get a low rate, you get a minimum monthly commitment instead, because the platform fee on your budget wouldn't cover the cost of onboarding you. Resellers frequently bundle the platform fee into their own management retainer, which is convenient for them and makes it very hard for you to see what the software costs on its own. Ask for the two numbers separately, in writing, before you sign anything.
Here's the arithmetic I'd run before taking the call. These are illustrative figures using a 1% platform fee, which is a friendly assumption, and a loaded cost of roughly $8,000 a month for the specialist or agency time the platform requires. Substitute your own quote when you get one; the shape of the answer rarely changes.
The pattern is the one you'd expect from any percentage-of-spend product: the fee scales with your budget and the work doesn't. What changes the verdict isn't the percentage, it's whether the capability you're buying has anything to do in your account. A cross-engine bid strategy managing one engine is a very expensive way to run Target CPA. I've never seen a business under about $100k a month in blended search spend get its money back from SA360, and I've seen several sign anyway because a board member asked whether they were on the enterprise stack.
Four conditions, and you want at least three of them true. One: you run meaningful spend on more than one search engine, meaning Microsoft Advertising is at least 15% of your budget rather than a rounding error somebody switched on in 2021. Two: your conversions need to be measured across search, display, and video in one attribution model, which is the actual argument for Floodlight and the only one that survives scrutiny. Three: your catalogue or location count makes hand-built campaigns impossible, so feed-driven campaign generation is doing work no person could do. Four: you have or will hire a specialist who owns the platform, because SA360 without an owner degrades into an expensive reporting layer within two quarters.
If none of those are true and you're still being sold it, the pitch has usually shifted to something softer: unified reporting, executive dashboards, a single source of truth. Those are real desires and there are much cheaper ways to satisfy them. Exporting Google Ads and Microsoft data into BigQuery and building a Looker Studio view costs a contractor a week and no percentage of your media forever. I've built that for clients who were quoted enterprise platform fees for what turned out to be a dashboard problem. The question to ask yourself is which specific decision you will make differently once the data is in one place. If you can't name it, you want a report, not a platform.
If you're taking the meeting anyway, and plenty of people should, go in with these. They're the ones that changed the number when I've sat on the client side of that table.
The pricing question people search for has a boring answer: SA360 costs roughly a percent of your media plus a specialist's salary plus a tagging project, and Google won't publish that because the number only makes sense at scale. The more useful question is what you'd do differently on Monday if you had it. If you can answer that with a specific decision involving a second engine or a catalogue too large to manage by hand, go buy it. If your honest answer is that your account would be better managed than it is now, that's not a platform problem and no enterprise licence has ever fixed it.
