Google released a new version of its Google Analytics product, adding new features and bringing in existing offerings that previously worked separately. Marketers can use the suite to track and respond to their customers more seamlessly than ever before. Above all, it’s a response to the growing threat by Facebook.
In the past year or two, Google had already released several of the features of what today is being branded Google Analytics 360 Suite. But the new release debuts several new features, including most significantly what appears to be a data management platform (DMP) to manage user profile data across a company’s site — a critical tool for large companies. This is where Facebook has come on very strong, particularly in the explosive mobile advertising market.
Google has brought these features into one place, giving enterprise-size marketers a much more powerful feedback loop: These marketers can now get data about customers coming to their site and respond more easily in real time with content that is specialized for those visitors.
With the new features, Google also appears to be encroaching on the territory of several big players in the enterprise data cloud or DMP space — for example, Oracle and Adobe. It also steps into A/B testing, where Optimizely is dominant, and data visualization, where Tableau has seen tremendous growth.
Google’s moves are significant, because it has the advertising reach and infrastructure scale to undermine many of these other players. Google said it’s applying the same infrastructure that allows it to handle billions and billions of daily search queries — generating answers before users even finish typing — to give enterprise marketers similar functionality. In this case, it means allowing marketers to provide their customers with the content, offers, or products that users are likely looking for, based on those customers’ past behaviors.
Facebook’s growing threat
The move is also significant because Facebook continues to grow in mobile, now threatening Google’s longtime dominance in display advertising. Google has chugged along with many of its analytics products for years, but has never pulled them together to offer a powerful suite for marketers.
Jon Cifuentes, an analyst at VB Insight, VentureBeat’s research arm, agreed: “Google is above all a marketing and advertising company — with channel dominance in search, email, display — with mobile and display threatened for the first time in years with Facebook, especially around mobile. It makes sense for them to beef up audience tracking.”
Google cited Pawan Divakarla, who leads analytics at Ohio-based Progressive Insurance, as an example of the suite’s significance:
“The Google Analytics 360 Suite gave us the really big ah-ha moment. When we launched our mobile app, it provided insurance quotes. But after looking at the data, we saw people were attempting to buy insurance. So, we shifted our mobile strategy to offer ecommerce. Google gave us that insight,” Divakarla said in a canned quote in Google’s announcement.
The new suite certainly rivals Facebook in terms of tracking people across devices and channels. But more than that, it integrates with other products like AdWords, DoubleClick, and third-party platforms through an API.
One thing that is clear: This is an enterprise-grade product, and is priced as such. The existing product, Google Analytics Premium, has been priced at $150K/year, and Google acknowledges that this is the fee you’ll have to pay for one of the main products of the 360 suite. But you’ll have to then pay for additional products a la carte, and associated fees with increased usage, features and services, Google spokesman Joe Osborne told VentureBeat.
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