Over 2000 years have passed since Julius Caesar was killed on March 15th, and yet we still hold the term “Ides of March” with a certain level of darkness and dread.
Friends, Digital Marketers, Countrymen, lend me your ears, for that all has now ended on March 15th, 2016 with Google’s announcement of their new 360 Suite of products. I feel fairly confident (slight exaggeration), that the “Ides of March” will no longer be associated with the murder of a major figure from the Roman Empire, but with some new game changing products from Google.
This new 360 suite is another step in Google’s attempt to surpass Adobe, Oracle, and other companies vying for the enterprise marketing cloud dollar.
Don’t Worry, Free GA Will Remain the Same
The free versions of Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager aren’t changing or going away any time soon. Our beloved tools are still going to give you the same bang for your buck (big bang, no bucks) as before. If you’re using the free versions, while you are going to have some more opportunities down the road, you shouldn’t see any major changes within the tools too quickly. One of the benefits of using one of the free versions is that when your company IS ready to move into the 360 Suite, you’ll already have your historical data collected for some great analysis.
Re-branding of Google Analytics 360
Due to Google’s recent rebranding, Google Analytics Premium, the enterprise level version of Google Analytics, has now been changed to the name Google Analytics 360 - the anchor of the software suite.
Why you should care: Well the name change isn’t a huge deal, but Google Analytics 360 is. The features remain the same: higher data collection limits starting at 1 billion hits a month, unsampled data, BigQuery integrations, 4 hour freshness, DoubleClick integrations like DoubleClick BidManager and DoubleClick for Publishers, 200 custom dimensions, data driven attribution modeling and more.
Complex Marketing & Ad Attribution: Google Attribution 360
Google acquired Adometry in 2014, a software that focuses on complex marketing and ad attribution. They have now renamed the platform, Google Attribution 360. When people talk about getting attribution from their television ads, and tying it to their website analytics via Google Analytics, this is probably what they’re talking about. Until this point they’d been related, but not directly tied together in the same suite, and that’s changing with this rollout.
Why you should care: If you’re doing television advertising and you want to tie your TV attribution together with other media - this platform is an excellent place to begin doing so. It allows you to use all your performance metrics across different data streams using data driven attribution, marketing mix modeling, and TV attribution, creating a much clearer and deeper insight into your attribution than ever before.
Advanced Tagging: Google Tag Manager 360
The new premium version of Google Tag Manager (GTM), with enterprise level support, and maybe some new bells and whistles?
Why you should care: Not a ton of detail on this, yet the enterprise level support for GTM itself is going to be valuable, and new “premium” ie “360” feature announcements for GTM probably aren’t that far off.
Super Charged Reporting: Google Data Studio 360
What’s the point of collecting data without good reporting and analysis? It’s why other enterprise level reporting products like Tableau or Domo exist. Google Data Studio 360 is throwing itself into that cage match with it’s new reporting, and built in real time collaboration.
Why you should care: While it’s not going to replace Tableau - yet, it’s a ton more usable and feature rich than the standard Google Analytics custom reports or dashboards. For instance you’ll be able to tie in third party data sources, or even Google BigQuery data. Not to mention an intuitive interface that builds these reports in seconds.
Game Changing Personalization: Google Optimize 360
Website testing and personalization is huge, and the power of integrating conversion rate optimization directly with Google Analytics and custom segments is so powerful that this product alone would have been a game changer.
Why you should care: Optimize is going to let you target audiences for testing based on Google Analytics data, just like your AdWords remarketing. No other optimization tool is going to be so inherently connected to your data.
Integrated & Holistic Marketing: Google Audience Center 360
This new data management platform has been designed to help us understand our customers, and find more customers like them across channels, devices, campaigns, etc. It’s integrated with both Google and Doubleclick, and it’s open to third party data. Interested in learning about more holistic marketing and creating closed loop reporting for your business? Check out our video to learn more.
Why you should care: Audience Center is going to let you bring together all your data, from your analytics, search, social, email, CRM, as well as doubleclick with a native integration and proprietary google data with connections to more than 50 third party data providers, will help you continue to close that loop on your reporting and find your most valuable customers.
Limited Betas
Audience Center, Optimize, Data Studio, and Tag Manager 360 are now in limited beta, with a rollout of the new naming for GA Premium, and Adometry to occur in the next few months.
As we move forward and gain new information about features and pricing, we’ll be excited to share them. There are a number of big game changing things here, and we’re excited to see them shake out.
