What is GA 360 & How Will it Impact You

Fellow Hubbers,
 
It’s been relatively quiet on the Google Analytics big product announcements recently.
Not any more. On Tuesday, Google announced a major product release – the Google Analytics 360 Suite.
 
GA 360 brings under one umbrella existing products (GA Premium, Google Tag Manager and attribution tool), upgraded products (Google’s A/B testing tool gets a major overhaul) and brand news products (Data Management Platform and a data visualisation tool).  As expected, the suite offers built in integrations with Google products such as AdWords and DoubleClick as well as other third party tools.
 
This move by Google is a two prong attack on both the analytics and distributed networks fronts. The main targets – Adobe, Oracle and Facebook but other players in the field will also be affected (for better or worse).
 
Google’s success will hinge on two key factors:

1. Can it convince CMOs to abandon their existing marketing tech stack in favour of an all-inclusive cloud solution? Would each individual tool be superior to the existing standalone solution the company is already using?
2. Are CMOs going to trust Google with more of their data, the company they buy most of their media from?

 
Neither question has been convincingly answered in the past but will be part of the extensive discussions being held throughout the DA Hub conference on June 8^th and 9^th at DeVere Latimer Place just outside of London.
 
Discussions such as Tom Betts’ Analytics Exploded - Dealing with the Rapid Rise of Distributed Platforms, Teemu Relander’s The Future & Promise of Attribution Modelling, Nick Redding’s Who, What, When? – Monetising Your Customer Data with Onsite Personalisation and Ulla Kruhse-Lehtonen’s Consumer Profiling as a Foundation for Multi-Channel Analytics, will expose the ramifications of how Google’s new product suite could impact your role and the way your organisation leverages data.

There are only 17 places available at each discussion and they are going quickly. Book your place today to confirm your place at the Hub and at these discussions.

Here is a short summary of the GA 360 tool set with some observations:

• Analytics 360 – the rebranded name for GA Premium. Google are promising some exciting new features likely to be announced at the Google I/O event in May
• Optimize 360 – a significant upgrade to Google’s A/B testing platform including a new visual drag and drop editor and new targeting and personalisation features. Optimize 360 puts Google in a position to compete with the likes of Optimizely, Visual Web Optimizer and the likes but yet to be seen whether it poses real competitions with high end tools such as Adobe Target, Oracle Maxymiser and Monetate
• Tag Manager 360 – based on Google's existing tag management solution. Tag management will be at the core of system helping integrate the various tools and enhance data capture and accuracy via powerful APIs
• Data Studio 360 – a data and visualisation tool integrated with the rest of the suite. The tool also offers integrations with other external data sources such as CRM via API connections. At first glance this tool looks focused predominantly on dashboard generation rather than visual data exploration so room to improve if Google look to rival Adobe Analytics Premium or trouble already troubled Tableau
• Audience Center 360 – a Data Management Platform (DMP). The DMP market is still embryonic so it is unclear whether this product could shift the market. Nevertheless, Google are in a great starting position. It holds tremendous amounts of data on most of us through its search, Gmail and Android data – some of this data already integrated into Google’s Remarketing Audiences features. None of their competitors hold anywhere near that level of customer data. Google’s nearest rival is likely to be Facebook’s Atlas product that is built on social profile data  
• Attribution 360 – a rebranding of the Adometry marketing attribution platform purchased in 2014, allowing marketers to evaluate the performance of their campaigns across channels. No significant change here