Better Attribution First. Smarter Budgets Second.

Two new SA360 updates are more powerful together than either is alone. One shows which campaigns are actually driving growth. The other moves budget toward them without waiting for someone to notice.

Every search portfolio keeps coming back to two questions. Which campaigns are really working, and is the money where it can do the most good?

SA360 now has an answer for each. Improved Data Driven Conversion Attribution is live globally as of 2H 2026. Adaptive Budgets, a new bid strategy, is in closed beta, with full commercial launch targeted for 2H 2026.

Each one is useful on its own, but used together they compound, since Adaptive Budgets is only as good as the conversion signal it’s working from.

How improved data-driven attribution changes conversion credit

Rule-based and basic data-driven attribution models have a well-known blind spot. They can give credit to organic conversions or low-lift engagements, which overvalues touchpoints that weren’t really doing much and skews how channels get judged.

Last-click and similar models are easy to explain but only capture part of how someone actually moves toward a decision. Data-driven models see more of the path, but they’ve traditionally leaned on correlation, so a channel can still get credit for a conversion that might have happened anyway.

SA360’s improved model brings incrementality signals directly into the attribution engine. Instead of asking which touchpoints simply appeared somewhere on the path to a conversion, it asks which ones were more likely to have influenced the outcome.

Turning it on is one choice: select the “system-defined DDA model” option from the attribution model dropdown. Worth preparing for is that credit will shift between channels once you switch. Campaigns working earlier in the journey often gain recognition they weren’t getting before, while campaigns that were simply catching people close to converting may see their share adjust. Pull a baseline under your current model first, so you can show stakeholders exactly what moved and why. The new picture isn’t worse, it’s more honest about where growth is actually coming from.

How Adaptive Budgets follows demand

Every portfolio manager knows this moment. One campaign hits its daily cap by lunchtime on a high-demand day. Another sits with half its budget unspent because demand just isn’t there.

Static, campaign-level caps create exactly that kind of inefficiency, holding back the campaigns that are working while underperforming ones sit on funds they can’t use well. The usual fix has been constant manual reallocation.

Adaptive Budgets does that automatically. It redistributes spend across the campaigns in a portfolio in real time, based on demand and conversion opportunity, while keeping total spend within the limits you’ve set. It works across Target CPA, Target ROAS, and Multi-Target portfolio strategies.

You stay in control of how far it can go. You set how much budget is allowed to shift, and you can add minimum and maximum spend for individual campaigns, so the ones that matter for reasons beyond pure performance, like a brand commitment or a program with dedicated funding, aren’t quietly starved because another campaign looked more efficient that week.

Getting the order right

If you’re planning to use both, switch to the improved attribution model first and let the numbers settle into a real baseline before turning on Adaptive Budgets. That way, any shift in spend can be traced to a genuine change in opportunity, not to the old model still working its way out of the system.

The system brings the speed to reallocate budget continuously. What it still needs from you is context, which campaigns matter for reasons a performance number won’t capture, and where the guardrails need to hold firm.

Better attribution tells you where your budget should go. Adaptive Budgets is what actually gets it there.

Improved Data Driven Conversion Attribution is live globally in SA360. Adaptive Budgets is in closed beta, accessible via SA360 Account Representatives, with full commercial launch targeted for 2H 2026.