Google launches its Analytics 360 Suite to provide better marketing measurement tools for “micro-moments”

Google is making a bigger play in the marketing data arena today, with the announcement that it is launching a new enterprise-oriented measurement platform called Google Analytics 360 Suite.

In an announcement post appearing today on the blog Inside AdWords, Vice President of Analytics, Display, and Video Products Paul Muret wrote:

“Sophisticated marketers who use analytics platforms are 3X more likely to outperform their peers in achieving revenue goals. It’s no wonder enterprise-class marketers have been telling us they need more from their marketing analytics tools. Many toolsets can’t cope: They’re too hard to use, lack sufficient collaboration capabilities, are poorly integrated, and require hard to find expertise.”

Marketers today “are trying to engage with brief moments of engagement,” he told Marketing Land, those mostly mobile interactions that Google has described as micro-moments. “If the value is not delivered” at the right time within those brief opportunities, he added, “consumers will quickly move on.”

This Suite is designed to provide more integrated, easier-to-use tools, he said, that can measure, provide insights and lead to actions that reach customers in those small windows of engagement.

Google is not announcing any new data sources that feed into the Suite; its cross-device tracking remains the same, and the initial announcement doesn’t include any ground-breaking functionality.

Instead, this expands beyond its star measurement tool for enterprise marketers, Google Analytics Premium, to provide an enlarged set of data-analyzing, -testing and -targeting tools for websites, apps and ads.

The biggest marketing platforms have all made data a key differentiator, as embodied in Oracle’s BlueKai, Adobe’s Audience Marketplace or Salesforce’s Wave. But Google Analytics holds a special place in marketers’ toolkit, and now this new platform is building a bigger house around it.

The Suite consists of six tools, the first four of which are new:

• Audience Center 360 (beta): This is Google’s first data management platform (DMP), and as one might expect, it is natively integrated into DoubleClick and AdWords. It can also be utilized with other demand-side platforms (DSPs).
• Optimize 360 (beta): A site testing and personalization product for delivering and testing multiple versions of visitor experiences. This is designed for A/B testing, for example, of two different landing pages which have been created in another tool.
• Data Studio 360 (beta): Data analysis and visualization that generates dashboards and reports. Google says that the real-time sharing and collaboration draws on the technology used in Google Docs.
• Tag Manager 360 (beta): Although based on a tag manager feature in Google Analytics, this product is considered new because it is now a full standalone product.
• Attribution 360, formerly known as Adometry. Based on an existing product, Google says this was “rebuilt from the ground up” so that marketers can attribute sales and other results across channels.
• Analytics 360, formerly known as Google Analytics Premium, the enterprise version of the workhorse site measurement product. The tech giant said this product will “serve as the measurement centerpiece by analyzing customer data from all touch-points,” with integration into the company’s ad products.

The individual products can be reached through a unified dashboard, and Google said there is a broad set of integrated third-party providers, such as customer relationship management platforms.

The products in the Suite will be offered à la carte, under to-be-announced pricing. Google Analytics Premium and Adometry will be relaunched under their new names “in the coming months,” and GA Premium and Adometry customers will be offered access to the new tools under the limited beta, at some unspecified point. The date for the public release of the full Suite has not yet been announced.