Insights
Head of Digital Strategy
Google Marketing Platform
The Google Marketing Platform is a suite of tools that combines advertising and analytics to help brands deliver their digital marketing strategy. On their own, these tools are advanced platforms, that can enhance the performance of individual marketing channels.
However, using two or more of these tools in conjunction with each other gives brands the ability to gain cross-channel insights and deliver an integrated strategy, taking results to the next level.
Data-driven marketing is not a new concept – good marketers have been using data to guide their strategy for years.
Unfortunately, due to the way they track data, many may use incomplete or incorrect data to guide their decisions. Analysing performance on a channel by channel basis doesn’t give a holistic overview of the customer journey. Without integrating the tools you use to monitor digital performance, you are only using half the picture to build a marketing strategy.
By integrating your digital marketing technology platforms, you create a 360 view of your customers and the path they take to conversion. These insights allow you to make informed marketing decisions and design an integrated strategy that can reduce spend, increase efficiency and achieve digital KPIs.
Tools in the Google Marketing Platform are able to natively integrate with one another – the more products you have, the more you can connect the data between your digital channels and build up an accurate overview of the customer journey.
Analytics 360 (GA360) can be thought of as the main hub for the GMP. It holds native connectors to each tool in the suite, meaning different platforms can connect to each other via Analytics 360.
Campaign Manager is a tool which can be used for ad serving, trafficking, and reporting on ads, allowing marketers to streamline ad management. The platform has several features and benefits that make it uniquely positioned to manage and execute campaigns from start to finish.
Integrating Campaign Manager with Analytics 360 allows marketers to view their campaign data in GA360 alongside non-paid channels. Results across channels are de-duplicated so that you can correctly attribute results to the right channels.
By connecting the two platforms, you can build a better picture of how paid and non-paid channels work together and what their roles are in the path to conversion.
Display & Video 360 is The Google Marketing Platform’s demand-side platform (DSP) which can be used for end to end campaign management. The platform has several advanced features that make an enterprise-level tool for buying media.
Integrating DV360 and GA360 allows marketers to see what happens to users post-campaign – i.e. what their journey looks like once they have clicked on a display advert. This gives a clearer view of the customer journey and also allows marketers to better understand campaign performance in line with their business objectives. Integrating these two platforms allows you to import your analytics audiences into Display & Video 360 so they can be targeted in your programmatic campaigns.
Search Ads 360 is Google’s enterprise-level search management platform. SA360 has premium features that can improve the performance of your search ads campaigns.
There as several ways you can benefit from integrating the two platforms. Connecting the two tools allows you to report on your paid campaigns in Analytics 360, meaning you can better understand how the user interacts with the website post-click.
A major benefit is the ability to export your GA360 goals into Search Ads 360, so campaigns can be optimised towards these goals and used as a bidding signal. You can also import your analytics audiences into SA360 (via Google Ads) and use these as auto-bid signals too.
Google BigQuery is a cloud-based data warehouse that can query large datasets, enabling you to gain more in-depth insights into your data than GA360 alone.
Connecting Analytics 360 and BigQuery allows marketers to set up an automated export of their raw session and hit data. Once the data is in BigQuery, you can conduct more complex queries to find patterns that you are unable to see in GA360. Data in BigQuery can be sent back to GA360 and used to create audiences, signal auto-bidding, as well as other insights.
Linking your CRM system with Analytics 360 enables you to understand how online and offline activity works together and provides a holistic overview of your customer journey. GA360 natively integrates with Salesforce but those who use a different CRM system, it is possible to integrate the two systems in other ways using measurement protocol.
By integrating your CRM and analytics data, you can build a comprehensive view of your users to understand how digital and offline channels influence the customer journey.
Joining up your CRM with Analytics 360 also lets you to build audience lists based off real customer data that can then be targeted in your ad and remarketing campaigns.
Once the datasets are connected, there are advanced analysis techniques that can reveal insights which can impact your marketing strategy. For example, joining offline sales with online behaviours can help you identify which behaviours are more likely to lead to high-value conversions.
Want to get the most out of the GMP?Contact us and we can make sure you do
Insights
Insights
Insights