An Overview of Google Analytics 360 Suite

During its annual Performance Summit, Google revealed many new product features. As part of the updates, Google announced that it is uniting its six enterprise analytics products under one common brand, Google Analytics 360 Suite. In this blog post, we’ll talk about the Google Analytics 360 Suite and what it means for advertisers.

What Is It?

Google Analytics 360 Suite is a new enterprise class marketing analytics solution comprised of 6 Google products:

• Optimize 360
• Audience Center 360
• Tag Manager 360
• Data Studio 360
• Analytics 360
• Attribution 360

Each product is designed to work together and also plug-and-play with AdWords, DoubleClick, and other Google products. The suite was designed based on user feedback requesting that tools be more integrated, especially ad tools and analytics tools. Google Analytics 360 Suite is rolling out now to current Google Premium and Adometry customers.

How Does it Work?

Deep Integrations

Optimize 360 increases testing agility and reduces setup times. For example, goals can be used from analytics to create site experiments. One user went from three days setup time for a site experiment to 10 minutes setup time. Paid beta is now open for all Analytics 360 customers.

Simple Collaboration

Data Studio 360 allows users to access all data in one place, build beautiful reports, and work collaboratively in real-time like other Google apps such as Google Docs. It’s easy to drag and drop, copy and paste data widgets, and then change the data source input, until a polished-looking report is finished. It integrates multiple connectors such as BigQuery sheets, YouTube analytics, and more. Data Studio 360 will be adding 3rd party sources moving forward, in addition to Google products. Three or more people can be working on the report at the same time, just like with other Google apps such as Google Docs, and reports can be shared immediately – no need to email drafts back and forth. Data Studio 360 is currently in paid beta; Google is also launching a free version with up to five free reports.

Built-in Intelligence

With literally millions of data points available with today’s tools, how can we tell what is the most meaningful data? And how much data scrubbing has to be done in Excel in order to find the actionable insights and recommendations? Google uses machine learning to help address that challenge, with natural language queries built into the Analytics 360 suite, via an “Ask a question” button in the top right corner. Users can speak or type in a question in natural language format. For example: “how many users did we get from organic search in April?” or “what were my best-selling products for April?” This innovation eliminates the need for specialized knowledge of Google Analytics, which would be otherwise required to set up the correct filters, navigate to the right reports, and complete other tasks, in order to answer those same questions.

What Does This Mean for Advertisers?

For advertisers who are already fully immersed in the Google products universe, this will create a much more seamless experience when looking to tie together end-to-end results. For advertisers who are currently cobbling together data from a variety of sources, this could help make that a less painful experience, with fewer data sources to pull from, especially once Google rolls out more third-party support. The biggest beneficiaries from the Google 360 suite are likely to be smaller/less experienced advertisers. The focus on integration, easy navigation, and collaboration are all likely to be much larger issues for smaller organizations without the broad depth and wide range of experience in troubleshooting and developing processes to solve these issues.

Download our full POV and more details on the Google updates here!