Google Analytics 360 Suite: Worth The Upgrade?
Over the summer, Google announced the rollout of the Google Marketing Platform, which brings DoubleClick advertiser tools and the Google Analytics 360 Suite together under one roof.
With a renewed spotlight on Google Analytics 360 Suite (or GA 360 Suite), your company may be taking another look at this enterprise analytics solution and wondering if it’s worth the upgrade.
Let’s take a deeper dive into the products under the GA 360 Suite and a few of the benefits offered by this super-charged platform to help you better determine whether or not an upgrade is the right move for your company.
GA 360 Suite: The Basics
The GA 360 Suite includes several Google products that you’re likely familiar or may currently use:
Analytics 360 – gives insight into how users interact with the business both online and offline.
Optimize 360 – allows businesses to run experiments to see which version of their website performs best.
Tag Manager 360 – provides an enterprise workflow that businesses can use to manage their web and app tags.
Attribution 360 – allows businesses to build cross-device, cross-channel attribution models to track ad clicks and impressions.
Audience Center 360 – consolidates user data to build audience lists and provides reports on the performance of marketing to each audience.
Surveys 360 – create online surveys to get feedback from audiences.
Data Studio – turns data into informative reports and visual dashboards so it is easy to spot trends.
Chances are, you’re currently using one, if not all, of the free versions of these tools. However, the upgraded versions definitely offer a few key benefits for enterprise companies with high-traffic websites.
Here are some of the benefits of Google Analytics 360 compared to standard Google Analytics.
Key Benefits from GA 360 Suite
Faster Insights
Users of standard Google Analytics have to wait up to two days for their data to become available. Google Analytics 360 guarantees that 98% of data will be available within four hours. Most data will appear within between 10 and 15 minutes.
Greater Accuracy
Standard Google Analytics uses sampling to generate reports if it has data on more than 500,000 sessions. This means that not all the data is available to view. Google Analytics 360 uses unsampled data for up to 100 million sessions, and always gives the option to view the fully unsampled report. This means businesses can make decisions based on all their data.
Custom Metrics
Google Analytics 360 gives much more control over which metrics to track. Businesses can use custom fields to capture information such as the gender, age, or order history of users. It is possible to set up to 200 custom metrics in Google Analytics 360.
Better Integration
Google Analytics 360 integrates seamlessly with Search Ads 360 and Display & Video 360, allowing marketers to view all their click and impression data in one place. Marketers can see which ads customers have seen but not clicked on leading up to their purchased, which enables more accurate attribution.
Higher Hit Volume
Large businesses with very popular websites are likely to breach the 10 million hits per month per site limit of free Google Analytics, which could lead to Google ceasing to process their data. Using Google Analytics 360, it is possible to track monthly hit volumes in the billions per site.
Technical Support
Official Google sales partners provide help with implementation, access to training, and a high level of technical support to customers when they purchase Google Analytics 360. As a result, businesses can be sure they are making the most of this powerful business intelligence tool.
Why Use Google Analytics 360?
If you’re running a high-traffic website, but you’re still unsure if the additional features would be worth the investment, here are a few scenarios in which upgrading to Google Analytics 360 would make sense.
Advertisers
Businesses that spend a lot of money on advertising need a tool that can help them be sure they are getting good results from their investment. Google Analytics 360 provides more in-depth insights into the ROI that the marketing budget is delivering thanks to Google’s unique machine learning capabilities.
For example, the additional features go beyond the basics to identify which users are likely to convert or which customers have high revenue potential.
Businesses Using Personalized Targeting
When it comes to personalization, the more data, the better, and Google Analytics 360 excels at harvesting and testing data for businesses who want to create personalized experiences for all customers.
In addition to more data, the Google Optimize 360 tool makes it possible to test strategies on various audiences to see which techniques provoke the best customer responses. This is particularly useful when retargeting customers to persuade them to come back to the website and make a purchase.
Publishers
Google Analytics 360 is also very useful for publishers. Linking the tool with DoubleClick for Publishers gives access to a vast amount of data that can help guide content optimization. This helps publishers understand user behavior on each page and see how each ad unit is performing.
Worth the upgrade?
If you’re an enterprise-level business and any of these situations apply to your business, then the benefits of upgrading to Google Analytics 360 Suite would likely be well worth the investment. You can learn more about Google’s enterprise solutions here.
However, smaller businesses can confidently skip the upgrade and still continue to find success with the free versions of Google’s marketing tools–especially since Google has been making some pretty impressive upgrades to their tools lately.
You can learn more about two of those recent upgrades in our blog posts Google Analytics Unveils Cross-Device Reporting and Google Analytics Reveals New Conversion Probability Report.
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