Google is gunning for Adobe's Marketing Cloud with a new set of enterprise products tailored to online marketers' needs
Enter the Google Analytics 360 Suite, which contains a potent list of previously distinct apps. They are the Google Analytics Premium (renamed into Google Analytics 360), Attribution 360 (formerly known as Adometry) and the Google Tag Manager.
Three novel products are also integrated in the latest Google Analytics 360 package: Optimize 360, Data Studio 360 and Audience Center 360.
TechCrunch spoke to Babak Pahlavan, the Google senior director of product management, and learned more details about the release.
One main focus of the enterprise pakage is to offer marketers solutions fit for the multi-screen world.
"This is about understanding the customer journey all the way to conversion," Pahlavan says.
He adds that the new service comes to meet the needs of marketers who work in medium and large organizations. The six separate apps that are part of the Google Suite are optimized so that marketers can engage the target audience at the best time. Also, the suite assists advertisers in a better recognition of opportunities.
Big names such as PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) already make use of Google's enterprise solutions.
Google strived to make the new set of tools easy to use, despite the extended amount of data they are processing. In fact, one key asset of the Google Analytics 360 Suite is that it delivers actionable information for marketers and not just simple, raw data.
"We focus on simplicity. How can we make tools that are extremely easy to use and that make it easy to collaborate?" says Pahlavan. He goes on to add that nobody uses tools that are unnecessarily complex.
The revamped variant of Google Analytics Premium, named Google Analytics 360, is the main tool from the package. This is where the important data collected by Google are gathered, centralized and put in orderly fashion.
Google also announced the rollout of Audience Center 360, a platform for data management that promises to feature integration with the company's tools (DoubleClick included). An extra point to Audience Center 360 is that it is able to receive data from third-party providers.
Optimize 360 is Google's way of helping marketers test A/B variants on their Web pages, so that they make the best selection between two images or text snippets.
Google Data Studio 360 holsters the most interesting set of features from the new tools, as it visually displays all the data resulted from analysis. Data Studio is backed by BigQuery (Google's data analytics platform) and was crafted relying on the collaboration and sharing technology that powers Google Docs.
Google mentions that the Adometry tool was rebuilt almost completely, while Analytics, Attribution and Tag Manager are all rebranded versions of previous tools that were buffed up with extra features. The changes should become visible to users within the next few months.
So far, the four novel services from the Google Analytics 360 Suite (Audience Center, Tag Manager, Optimize and Data Studio) are in beta testing and only a small number of users get to test them out.
Users who have subscriptions to Adometry and Google Analytics Premium should get invitations to join the new betas in the following months. Google said that the Adometry and Google Analytics Premium brands will be closed in the near-to-medium future.
