A Marketer's Guide to Google Analytics 360

GA vs GA 360

Standard (Free)

In 2005, Google launched Google Analytics (GA), a free solution to our analytics problems – setting the foundation for digital reporting and analytics. 

In the past, there were several tools that counted the number of hits to a site however, they were not always user friendly or most up to date. GA made web analytics available faster, more reliable and easily scalable for businesses to use their data to:

• Understand how users are moving through the site
• What are they interested in 
• How they get to the site
• Which marketing efforts are effective 
• Which marketing efforts can be improved

Over time, it’s reporting and tracking abilities have expanded to include features, such as multi-channel funnel reports, enhanced ecommerce, and attribution modeling.

Enterprise ($$$$)

In 2011, Google Analytics launched Google Analytics Premium (later to be renamed Google Analytics 360). Bringing extra processing power, data freshness, advanced analysis– as well as SLA guarantees to clients – GA 360 leveled up the free tool to a truly enterprise-worthy platform meant for enterprise-level businesses who have outgrown standard GA. 

In this post, we'll share details that may help your company determine if you’ve outgrown standard GA and are ready for an enterprise solution like GA360.

Why GA360?

Benefits

If you’ve hit limitations within your free subscription to Google Analytics Standard, chances are you are looking for a more robust, enterprise-level analytics solution to better fit your needs. If you are looking to compare the tools, click here.

A few of the high-level benefits include unsampled data, roll-up properties, custom funnels, advanced tools, and powerful integrations.

Not only does GA 360 provide access to advanced features, Google Tag Manager 360 is included with the GA 360 purchase at no additional cost to help you level-up and streamline tag management which can also save you a lot of time, hassle, and money. 

If you have a high-trafficked site that receives greater than 10 million interactions a month, you might have received a message.

This is because the standard version of Google Analytics has a monthly limit of 10 million interactions per property.

When a site exceeds this limit, they may start to forcibly exclude data that you send to them from being processed and cannot guarantee the data will be processed properly.  This makes your data directional at best, and less useful for decision making. 

However, with GA 360, Google can guarantee service levels outlined in the agreed-upon SLA for data collection, reporting, data processing, and customer data uptime. This will eliminate the processing and sampling issues mentioned above. But if there are any issues, GA 360 provides access to a dedicated customer support representative via your GA 360 reseller.

Read our guide for more on the impact of data sampling on decision-making.

Key Features

Over the years of working with GA 360, we’ve determined that these are GA 360 features to get started with ASAP. 

There are so many new tools at your fingertips but it can be difficult to dive right in without a plan. With access to your current GA and an understanding of your business needs Seer can help determine which features are right for you in the first 30 days, 3 months, 6 months and so on even before you purchase GA 360 to help you get the most out of your investment. 

*While you can’t change the default attribution model, you can compare each from within the UI.

Integrations

Google Marketing Platform

Although Google’s products are good on their own, they become even better when paired together with GA 360. Here are some GA 360 integrations we love.

As part of the Google Marketing Platform, these integrations allow you to connect different sources of data and analyze them together, driving a seamless approach to efficient analyses.

Google Data Studio

Data Studio is not exclusively to GA 360 but it’s still a part of the Google Marketing Platform.

GDS can be used to create data visuals based on a variety of integrations but the visuals themselves are only as good as the data source. If GDS is connected to Google Analytics, you’re still subject to sampling (data also takes 24+ to process).

With GA 360, GDS can become a more powerful tool when used with BigQuery which allows the joining of multiple datasets, data transmission, and granular data (that is usually processed and pre-aggregated by Google Analytics).

Here are some ways you can get started with GDS: GDS for Beginners, Data Studio Template I, and Data Studio Template II.

Google Optimize

Optimize is a free testing tool that natively integrates with Google Analytics to easily run tests on your website, starting from simple A/B tests to slightly more complex multivariates. Optimize 360 on the other hand is the paid (& supercharged) version of Optimize Free.

Google Optimize offers expanded testing features — including personalization experiences. It also enables up to 100 tests running at a time (versus 5 for the free version), more experiment objectives, multivariate tests, audience targeting, and more! 

When used together, subsets of your website users, remarketing audiences, or even custom funnel segments created in GA 360 can all be used to target specific experiences in Optimize 360. This allows you to easily deliver a personalized experience to each of your nuanced audience segments.

You can also take advantage of the 200 custom dimensions and metrics to enrich your GA data with test details like “Test Type”, “Control or Variant”, “Targeting Rules” etc. 

Google Tag Manager

Google introduced the tag management system known as Google Tag Manager (GTM) back in 2012. The goal of GTM being to help digital marketers track web and marketing activity without digging into the websites’ codebase to do so.

As one of the most widely used tag management solutions, GTM allows users to efficiently test and deploy new website and marketing tags - as well as maintain existing tags all within a user-friendly Google interface

GA 360 + GTM 360 allows companies to use tag management tool across teams with advanced tools/features. 

• Unlimited Workspaces (as opposed to 3 in standard GTM) and approval settings for each is vastly helpful when it comes to QA and implementation. 
• Zones that breakout the website into specific containers so that tracking can be applied to either specific sections of the site or the master container. 
• Boundaries put specific rules on the types of tags that can be deployed by specific users. Certain users like developers might have full permissions to publish and type of tag while marketing managers can only publish marketing tags for their specific section of the site.  

Search Ads and Display & Video 360

Search Ads 360 (SA 360) and Display and Video 360 (DV 360), formerly known as Doubleclick Search and Doubleclick Bid Manager are part of the GMP. The rebranding announcements can be found here.

• SA 360 is not a search engine but it does run ads across several search engines including: Google Ads, Bing Ads, Yahoo Japan, Baidu, and Yahoo! Gemini.  
• DV 360 is a campaign management platform that allows marketers to manage their programmatic, and programmatic guaranteed campaigns across display, video, TV, audio, and other channels, all in one place.

With the GA 360 integration,  SA 360 and/or DV 360 dimensions and metrics straight from within the GA 360 interface, allowing for holistic analysis and audience building for remarketing and campaign optimization. 

Google Surveys

Like other GMP products, Google Surveys has a free version and a 360 version. Surveys 360 are for large enterprise companies that want to run surveys frequently and are charged monthly for services. Other benefits include: remarketing audiences in Google Ads based on survey respondents and zip-code level targeting.  

The free version of Surveys, charges customers per survey, it is geared towards small-mid sized companies running ad hoc surveys. 

Want to take a deeper dive into Google Surveys? Read more about using the tool for market research in this blog post.

Salesforce

The GA 360 + Salesforce Sales and Marketing Cloud Integrations help marketers get a better understanding of how marketing influences the purchase decision and what content brings in qualified versus unqualified leads. 

This process we call “closed loop” marries your customer’s online and offline data to create a full picture including from entering the site, becoming a lead, and all the way to closed won. 

Check out Salesforce Sales Cloud Part I, Salesforce Sales Cloud Part II, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud for more info.

Case Studies

GA 360’s features, when combined with powerful integrations, make it easier to solve complex problems by making data collection the least of your concerns. 

Below are some examples of how GA 360 drives ROI:

Analytics & PPC TV Test Leads to 69% Increase in Conversions

GA 360’s attribution models and data freshness were used to accurately gauge the effects of TV and PPC campaigns on web analytics.

How We Tracked 46 Sites and Saved Our Client $36,000

GTM 360 was used in conjunction with GA 360 to strategically update tracking for 46 of the client’s sites, saving our client $36,000.

GA 360 Remarketing Leads to +23% ROI ($1.69MM Est. Revenue)

We used Advanced Analysis to create a custom funnel for each step of the user journey and create PPC retargeting audiences to potentially make the client $1.69MM in revenue in a year.

GA 360 Salesforce Integration Reveals True Marketing Impact 

GA 360 was used in conjunction with Salesforce Sales Cloud data to “close the loop” between online and offline user behaviors to understand what marketing efforts and content drove the most closed deals.

View all case studies

How to Upgrade

GA360 Agency

GA360 can be purchased, renewed, or implemented through any of the 500+ agencies in the Google Marketing Platform Partner portfolio.

At Seer, we know that clean, reliable data is vital to the success of any business and is used to inform decisions, big and small. That's why we get our clients down to a point of single-truth for trust in their data using GA 360. 

We don’t sell and walk away, we become an extension of your team to fully support your enterprise analytics program as your partner. Seer dedicates an Analytics team member(s) to your account for:

• Leveraging GA 360 feature tools
• Troubleshooting 
• Leveling up issues to the Google product team
• Industry updates
• Details about new features
• Access to Seer exclusive tools

In addition to the unlimited service-level agreement (SLA) support above, you get the following FREE with Seer as your Analytics Partner:

• 10 Hours/Month for Additional Support: Custom training, measurement strategy, data science, data visualization, comprehensive analyses, and more!
  
• Google Tag Manager 360: Access enterprise tracking implementation and management with the upgraded version of GTM included with any purchase of GA 360.
  

Choosing Seer to purchase GA 360 means you get access to all of the benefits mentioned above in addition to other Seer services. After all, Seer Interactive is a digital marketing agency specializing in Analytics, SEO, Paid Media, Creative, and Conversion Rate Optimization.

Our team of 200+ strategy consultants deeply understand the needs of our clients and work to create solutions that drive ROI.

Working with Seer means you not only leverage the data and features GA 360 provides but you can apply the insights to other marketing efforts like SEO and PPC for exponential growth.

Depending on your goals and business needs, Seer can provide a holistic scope across some or all of our teams to help you reach your destination.

GA360 Pricing & Costs

Although we can’t provide pricing up front, you can contact us for a custom quote based on your unique business needs. 

Let's Chat GA360

How can we help advance your company's enterprise analytics program?