Google Releases Cloud Marketing Analytics Suite

Google's Analytics 360 suite joins products from Adobe, Salesforce, Oracle and others in the fast growing marketing analytics field.

Google has released a set of data and marketing analytic tools that it says will give enterprise marketing teams better visibility of customer behavior and Web sales teams the ability to craft more effective marketing messages and personalized ad campaigns.Google's Analytics 360 suite combines two existing Google technologies—Google Analytics Premium (GA Premium) and Google Attribution 360—with four brand new data management, analysis and visualization tools.The set of six products gives organizations a tightly integrated platform for deriving quick insights from online consumer behavior as it is happening, and then using that to try and drive sales conversions, Paul Muret, vice president of Google's Analytics, Display and Video Products group, wrote in a blog post announcing the new suite."Our lives are filled with micro-moments: intent-rich moments when we turn to the nearest device to find a store, buy a product or look for answers to all kinds of wants and needs," Muret, st ated in his blog. By capturing these moments, enterprise marketers have a way to influence what consumers do, where they go and what they buy, he said. "It all starts with understanding consumer behavior in the moment—getting the right insights, and then making your brand useful to consumers." The Google Analytics 360 suite is designed to give marketers better visibility and context around customer interactions via mobile devices, the web and other channels. Instead of just capturing data at the various customer touch points, the analytics suite will give marketers insight they can use to drive their marketing messages and campaigns, he said.Google's Analytics 360 suite joins a crowd of other so-called marketing cloud technologies that are designed to help enterprises optimize their marketing efforts by enabling them to gather and analyze data across a range of customer interactions and channels. Some of the other major vendors that offer a similar capability include Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce.com and Microsoft.Gartner last year released its first Magic Quadrant analyzing vendors in the marketing cloud space in response to what it said was growing interest from enterprise chief marketing officers in analytics technology.According to Gartner, the budget for marketing analyti cs has been growing in enterprises and now represents 34 percent of overall marketing budgets. Driving the trend is a confluence of factors including channel convergence, a need for better media measurement capabilities and easier to use analytics interfaces."While Web analytics continues to function as a mature market, the broader digital marketing analytics ecosystem is undergoing rapid and significant change," Gartner had noted in its report.Google's GA Premium, which has been renamed Google Analytics 360, serves as the analytics engine of the new suite. Google Attribution 360, previously called Adomtery, is the other previously existing Google product in the new suite. It gives marketers a way to analyze how well their marketing investments are doing across different sales channels including mobile and the Web.The four new products that Google announced this week as part of its Analytics 360 suite are all still in beta.Google Audience Center 360, another of the new products, is a data management platform that offers native integration with DoubleClick and Google's own analytics technologies. According to Google, it helps enterprises understand their customers and find more like them. The new Google Optimize 360 is a Website testing and personalization technology that Google says companies can use to optimize the user experience for Web users.Google's new Data Studio 360 meanwhile is a data analysis and visualization tool for creating dashboards and interactive reports. The product offers support for real-time collaboration and report sharing across the enterprise. The fourth new product in the suite is Tag Manager 360 for improving data accuracy and workflows.
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