Understanding the Google Analytics 360 Suite

Last month, Google announced the new Google Analytics 360 Suite— an enterprise collection of products focused on the measurement and marketing realms that are meant to work together to help marketers improve their overall effectiveness in digital marketing.

There are six products that make up this new suite of offerings, four of which are brand new. Each can be used individually, but they’ll help the digital marketing flow even more when they work together. Let’s explore the way a company could use all six of these products together to create, inform, optimize, and act on their digital properties.

Tag Manager 360

Google Tag Manager, an existing product, has quickly become the standard program for implementing all tags throughout websites. The ease of use and integration with other third-party tools is why so many marketers and programmers alike are in favor of a tag management system.

Tag Manager 360 (the updated product) will help get all of the tags in place that are needed to allow for tracking and analysis of audiences and behaviors throughout your site. Laying this foundation of tracking—and knowing upfront what you need to track—is critical to any successful digital property.

Audience Center 360

This is a new tool from Google that will combine first-party analytics data with other data that Google has on like-users and third-party data that’s available. Audience Center 360 will help marketers create lists of like-minded users to target and eliminate a lot of the unknowns of targeting ads.

If you have ever run a paid search, display, or video campaign and wondered whether or not you’re really hitting your target audience, Audience Center 360 can help you to make sure that answer is yes—while making it easy to target the audiences you build with Google and other advertising products.

Optimize 360

Another new product in the suite is Optimize 360, which may just be the “cream of the crop.” Google has long dabbled in A/B testing and optimization tools—from Google Website Optimizer to the current Experiments located directly within Google Analytics.

While these tools have done the job on a small scale, Google has never had an answer for the likes of Optimizely, Adobe Test & Target, and others. They’re now hoping to change that with Optimize 360.

With this product, you can easily set up A/B and multivariate tests with an easy-to-use page editor or by uploading different versions of pages yourself. It also includes integration with Analytics 360, where you can easily pull in your created segments and audiences to test only with those you want to be part of your experiment.

While tools like this currently exist, it’s the potential for personalization that makes Optimize 360 so impressive. You’ll be able to take what you find in your tests and, pending the results from different audience segments, push the top performing content to users in different segments, personalizing their experience across your site.

Attribution 360

Adometry was acquired by Google in 2015, and they have quickly molded this into their analytics suite. Attribution 360 is the industry-leading tool that can unify attribution across different channels, including the digital web and television.

Understanding the effectiveness of all cross-channel marketing is imperative for businesses to improve their performance and know what is truly working and increasing return on investment. The inclusion of Attribution 360 will allow users to take data online (from Analytics 360) and offline (television, etc.), then combine that data with information from Audience Center 360 to create more direct and focused marketing campaigns to their target audiences.

Analytics 360

Nothing major is currently changing with the base analytics package. Google Analytics Standard will still be named the same, while Google Analytics Premium will now become Analytics 360.

If your company is currently using Premium, you may start to see a change in layout and appearance of this toolset in the coming months, but it doesn’t look as though any new features will be coming at this time.

Data Studio 360

The visualization of data has seemingly been a struggle in the digital world. How can we take the masses of data we have, from many different sources, and combine them into a straightforward, easy-to-use visualization to share across the company?

This is a question that many Business Intelligence programs have tried to solve over the years, and many have been successful in bringing us tools such as Sisense, MicroStrategy, and more.

Data Studio 360 is Google’s own answer to these outside tools. This will integrate nicely with all other Google products while at the same time allowing for the inclusion of outside data from many other sources.

Users of Data Studio 360 will be able to create quick, effective, and customized dashboards to display performance across the company. These dashboards can then be shared out in a variety of ways between teams.

So is the new Google Analytics 360 Suite a game changer for marketers? Time will tell once users can finally get these products in their hands and into their company’s workflow, but on paper, this new suite seems to be an attempt to align all the benefits of Google Analytics with industry leader Adobe’s current Marketing Suite.