Cardinal Path POV: Summarizing Google’s Key Product Updates

At the recent 2016 Google Performance Summit, we heard a number of announcements around Google’s advertising and analytics platforms. We’ve honed in on the analytics updates with a summary of what’s new and what’s ahead.

Google Analytics 360 Suite has some key features and products, some of these that have recently rolled out include:

• Optimize 360 – A content testing tool that allows for the rapid prototyping of experiments with Google Analytics audiences to deliver personalized web experiences. A paid beta is currently available.
• Attribution 360 – Built from Google’s acquisition of Adometry, Attribution 360 allows you to give credit where credit is due across the multiple ad interactions a user has with your brand. Achieve a holistic view from across multiple marketing channels – both online and offline. Measure TV like digital in order to understand cross-channel performance. This is publicly available; though a client fit assessment is required.
• Audience Center 360 – With Google’s long-anticipated data management platform (DMP) offering, you can now bring together data from disparate sources (e.g., CRM, display, search) to provide a deeper understanding of how audiences engage with your brand across all channels. The native integration with DoubleClick offers access to Google’s proprietary data, as well as 3rd-party data providers. A paid beta is currently available with a client fit assessment is required.
• Data Studio 360 – Build dynamic reports in minutes by bringing in data from Google Analytics, BigQuery, Google Sheets, AdWords, Attribution 360, and YouTube Analytics. Share and edit in real time with built-in collaboration tools. Paid and free versions of the product are available in the U.S. Additional regions coming later this year.
• Tag Manager 360 – Tag Management Solution with enterprise class tag management features backed by front end and back end service level agreements (SLAs) and services for Google Analytics 360 clients.

Mobile First
The redesign of AdWords to fit the “mobile-first” world has led to ~20% improvement in click-through rates for advertisers who have adopted these changes. This news comes quickly on the heels of the Analytics 360 Suite announcement, showing an investment in broader marketing technology efforts.

Both users and advertisers will benefit from Google’s mobile-first updates to AdWords. Mobile users will benefit from longer, more informative ad headlines, as well as longer descriptions on a single line of text. Bid adjustments for all device types and demographics for search ads (beta) are now available, allowing advertisers to bid by gender and age group. On the display side, advertisers can now simply submit a few basic attributes (ad text, ad image, landing page URL) and let Google dynamically design creative to fit publisher sites, ad slots, and mobile apps.

Knowing that nearly a third of all mobile searches are related to location, Google has strengthened the integration between AdWords and Google Maps to lead the way in measuring the online to offline customer journey with AdWords omni channel measurement. Users now have the ability to search in-store inventory when drilled into a local business page, while advertisers can measure cost-per-store-visits across campaigns to help build local strategies.

Precision Targeting & Machine Learning
Taking customer targeting a step further, Similar Audiences is now available for Search to help extend your reach and target new prospects. Similar Audiences looks at your existing remarketing audiences and finds new and qualified customers with shared interests. The reach of Google Display Network (GDN) remarketing campaigns is being extended to include additional sites and apps, while continuing to offer the same precise targeting based on users’ past site visitation behavior.

Google is also exploring new ways to bring the power of its Machine Learning practice forward to help companies generate more insights in an intuitive way. The promise: Get instant answers about your marketing performance from Google Assistant by typing in a question or by asking the question directly into your mic. For example: “How much of my web traffic came from paid search last week?”, or, “What were my top selling products last month?”

With the announcement of its Analytics 360 Suite, Google is embracing the idea of providing advertisers with a marketing technology stack that unites several Google-branded platforms — Google Analytics 360 Suite, DoubleClick, AdWords, Google Cloud Platform, and Google Apps — in addition to enabling 3rd-party integrations. The intended result is seamless delivery of insights to guide marketing decisions, and the tools and integrations to act on those decisions.

What’s Next
Google is continuing to update the AdWords experience to better surface insights and take action. Over the next few months, Cardinal Path will be testing the new AdWords experience and providing feedback prior to the public launch to help ensure an optimal experience for our clients. Launch of this new experience is slated for 2017.

By now offering personalization and testing, a Data Management Platform (DMP), data visualizations, online and offline measurement, plus a revamped tag management system to help ensure consistent data and simplify the technical work needed to power the new suite, Google Analytics 360 Suite is covering a lot of bases for marketers.

To learn more about putting Google Analytics 360 Suite to work for you, please contact us.