What is it?
The Google Marketing Platform (GMP) was announced earlier this year and is Google’s recent rebrand and attempt to bring together the DoubleClick Digital Marketing suite, as well as the Google Analytics 360 tools. The idea is to help advertisers plan, buy, report and optimise campaigns with greater ease. It represents a unification of Google’s analytics and media products, with the main goal of ensuring marketing is more transparent and efficient.
The launch of this new product is a natural evolution, given the increasing use of both the DoubleClick (DC) and Google Analytics (GA) suite, to combine measurement and media.
What’s different?
- Display and Video 360 (DV360): a platform that will combine elements from DoubleClick Bid Manager, Campaign Manager (DCM), DoubleClick Studio and Google’s Audience Centre.
- Search Ads 360 (formerly DoubleClick Search)
What does this mean for advertisers and agencies?
- The GMP offers one consolidated view across multiple reporting platforms, which should eventually allow for better optimisation and reporting from a single source of truth. No more discrepancies between DC and GA.
- Advertisers will be able to connect all Google platforms with ease i.e. DV360 (formerly DBM) to Google Ads (formerly AdWords), as well as Analytics 360 (formerly Google Analytics 360).
- Google Marketing Platform also plugs into 100+ exchanges, measurement solutions, and other tech providers. This gives the platform users more control over what media is bought, how it’s bought, and ultimately, how it is measured.
- Like the above, it also integrates with 23 third-party vendors for ad verification and brand safety, something that is an essential part of the marketing make-up.
- Google is also using this new platform to dig deeper into smarter ways of implementing cross-device tracking and getting a single customer view.
- Improvements have also been made to each of the products. DV360 now has a wide creative format gallery where marketers can see creative specs and mock-up creative assets themselves.
All Response Media viewpoint
Strengthening the products and the foundation of the suites could mean greater investment in the Google channels. However, it is important to remember that currently, the Google Marketing Platform is in its early days, with more changes still to come. There have been a few initial bumps and bugs, however, we expect this to have a long-term positive impact on our media buying, as it means there will be a one-stop shop to analyse all media. It will also mean that time spent on account logins/admin/management should reduce; rather than using multiple platforms to tell a story, we should be able to use one. It’s hard to say what specific changes will affect media buying the most, however, there are some sure wins such as DV360 being able to optimise towards DoubleClick floodlights (which will mean a 100% conversion count match rate). We will know more once Google releases the platform updates, but it is an area to keep a close eye on as it evolves.
