google web analytics 360 suite marketersThe new Google Analytics 360 Suite is good news for marketers. The centralized web analytics platform offers a significant improvement in marketer’s ability to track and store information about customers and their behaviors. Some observers even compare the development to an earthquake that will shake up online marketing.

Google hopes to become a one-stop web analytics shop for marketers by combining six separate analytics tools in one suite.

The Analytics 360 Suite contains a mix of new and repackaged products. Google says marketers can use Audience Center 360, a data management platform (DMP) to store and analyze customer data collected across multiple different devices and platforms. The new Google Optimize 360 enables marketers to personalize their websites for different types of visitors. The Google Data Studio transforms marketers’ data into interactive reports and dashboards. The suite also includes an updated analytics feature called Google Analytics 360, formerly the Google Analytics Premium, and an attribution product known as Google Attribution 360, previously called Adometry.

Google’s platform offers marketers a more complete view of their customers and their online activities. That will improve marketers’ ability to deliver relevant, targeted content. As more customers frequently research products online with smartphones, often while shopping in stores, understanding the customer’s shopping journey is more important than ever.

Customers to Benefit

Consumers will benefit even more than marketers, says Andrea McFarling, director of marketing at Adlucent.

Customers are disillusioned with traditional advertising, and are adopting ad-blocking technology for a better Web experience. The one-stop analytics suite will help marketers counter that problem by enabling them to deliver more “humanized advertising,” she writes in Venture Beat.

“The 360 Suite promises to give brands faster and easier access to customer, performance, and third-party data across all channels so that they can create an advertising experience that more closely aligns with how consumers actually research and shop, while still maintaining the privacy of the end consumer,” McFarling asserts.

It isn’t a silver bullet, but it’s definitely step in the right direction, she adds.

An Expected Earthquake

“It’s like an earthquake that was predicted,” Gartner vice president Andrew Frank told Marketing Land, noting that many online marketing experts expected such a centralized analysis system. The only surprise was that it took so long.

“Marketers want to understand the customer journey across the entire customer life cycle. It’s no longer good enough to apply adtech to acquisition and then address the customer separately with martech for retention, up-sell, cross-sell, etc,” stated Forrester analyst Rusty Warner, according to Marketing Land.

The suite is similar to offerings from Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce and IBM, but experts say Google is not directly challenging those cloud solutions. Suite 360 does not support management of marketing campaigns beyond ads, as it lacks substantial marketing implementation tools, such as social media management.

Bottom Line: Digital marketing experts say the Google 360 Suite marks a major advance, perhaps even a milestone, in online marketing and web analytics. The centralized platform improves marketers’ ability to understand their customers’ shopping, purchase patterns, and helps enable them to improve marketing content.