And finally, Google did it. Google announced the launch of Analytics 360 suite yesterday, a new product for enterprise marketers directly challenging Adobe’s Marketing Cloud and other similar enterprise level services such as (Oracle’s BlueKai, Adobe’s Audience Marketplace or Salesforce’s Wave).
The Analytics 360 Suite will combine Google Analytics Premium (now called Google Analytics 360) and Adometry (now called Attribution 360), with an enterprise-class version of Google’s Tag Manager and three brand new products (Audience Center 360, Data Studio 360, and Optimise 360) into a single solution for enterprise marketers.
In the announcement post appearing yesterday on the blog Inside AdWords, Paul Muret, Vice President of Analytics, Display, and Video Products at Google, wrote:
“Sophisticated marketers who use analytics platforms are 3X more likely to outperform their peers in achieving revenue goals. It’s no wonder enterprise-class marketers have been telling us they need more from their marketing analytics tools. Many toolsets can’t cope: They’re too hard to use, lack sufficient collaboration capabilities, are poorly integrated, and require hard to find expertise.”
Babak Pahlavan, Google’s Senior Director of Product Management, explained that the change is to provide marketers with a new solution that helps them work more efficiently in a multi-screen world and avoid making marketing decisions learned during the desktop era. Commenting further on customer journeys Pahlavan explained “But this is about understanding the customer journey all the way to conversion”.
The new enterprise-oriented measurement platform, is meant to help marketers engage with the right users at the right time with the right tool (within the suite) and help advertisers understand their customers’ journeys better than ever before using Google’s tech.
The guiding principle behind all of the new tools was to ensure they were easy to use, and provided marketers with actionable information and not just a barrage of data even as they pull in vast amount of data.
Pahlavan quoted “if you have very complex tools, they don’t get used, we focus on simplicity. How can we make tools that are extremely easy to use and that make it easy to collaborate?”
Google is certainly not announcing any new data sources or streams that feed into the Analytics 360 Suite; its cross-device tracking remains the same, and the initial announcement doesn’t include any ground-breaking functionality either.
Instead, this expands the boundaries of Google Analytics Premium beyond the ultra-popular measurement technology for enterprise marketers, to provide an enlarged set of data-analysing, -testing and -targeting tools for websites, ads and apps.
The Suite consists of six technologies and tools, the first four of which are brand new:
- Audience Center 360 (in limited beta): Google’s first data management platform (DMP) natively integrated into DoubleClick and AdWords. Moreover, it can also be utilised with other, data providers, demand-side platforms (DSPs) and many more.
- Optimize 360 (in limited beta): Not just another testing tool but complete site testing and personalisation product for delivering and testing multiple versions of user experiences such as landing pages. Google’s content experiments within Google Analytics are already doing a similar job as of today. It would be interesting to see what else Google has to offer in this new (and hopefully) improved piece of tech.
- Data Studio 360 (in limited beta): The brand new data analysis and visualisation engine that generates dashboards and reports. Google says that they have used Google Docs technology to bring the real-time sharing and collaboration.
- Tag Manager 360 (in limited beta): This is the same as Google tag Manager. Nothing has changed from the product point of view but this is considered new because it is now a full standalone product.
- Attribution 360, more popularly known as Adometry: Based on an existing product, Google state, this is “rebuilt from the ground up” so that marketing professionals can attribute sales and other results across channels.
- Analytics 360, formerly known as Google Analytics Premium: the enterprise version of the Google’s flagship site measurement product. With integration into other ad products, this will “serve as the measurement centerpiece by analysing customer data from all touch-points,” as per the tech giant.
The four new products in the suite (Audience Center, Data Studio, Optimize and Tag Manager) are now in limited beta. It is expected that current Google Analytics Premium (now Analytics 360) and Adometry (now Attribution 360) users should see an invite to join the new betas very soon.
