by Tasmin Kingma. Google Marketing Platform is a consolidated solution for cross-channel marketing which enables a centralised ecosystem. It involves a mixed set of advertising, measurement, creative and analytics products which allows for end-to-end digital advertising solutions. This supports marketers in gaining insights into the user’s online journey to understand their behaviour, interactions and where their digital touchpoints are.
Customer behaviour is key
As a marketer, you want to know your customer’s behaviour. Google Analytics presents web and app analytics which enable you to analyse and understand user on-site, in-app digital and offline data. This allows for insights into media, behavioural and user-experience (UX) optimisation, just to name a few.
Here are the top four things marketers need to know about Google Analytics:
- On-site behaviour may be combined with any advertising to get valuable insights into your target audience
- Data may be used to understand why users drop off or abandon their shopping cart so that optimisation can take place
- Data indicates which content works and how the content may then be optimised, and
- Mobile device insights are used to optimise UX.
When linked with Google Optimize, you can run website experiments to determine the optimal experience for each group of users and you can see how they perform against the goals you set. The biggest benefit is that you don’t have to use a one-size-fits-all campaign; through split-testing, you can reach the best content combinations, call-to-actions and more to match your campaign to its target audience’s behaviour.
Advanced buying
With an optimised experience, you know that users will react positively. Now it’s important to match the online advertising to that optimised experience.
Display & Video 360 is an advanced demand-side platform and comes with end-to-end digital marketing campaign management, all of which helps streamline the creative development process, simplify your media planning, and reach the right audiences. It’s not just about buying advertising on publisher sites; it’s about talking to the right audience, at the right time, with the right frequency and with the right message.
Search Ads 360 allows for the management, automation and optimisation of search engine marketing campaigns in real-time and at scale. It also has a centralised view and advanced reporting of the effect of search engine marketing on the user journey. A great buying tip is creating custom conversion rules, which will allow for maximum performance optimisation of your campaigns.
One single view of your marketing efforts
How are all these channels connected to provide one view of marketing efforts? With Campaign Manager. This is the core of the centralised ecosystem and serves creative to the user while recording data that can be measured and fed back into a marketing strategy. Campaign Manager also enables audience building, onsite tracking and advanced insights to cross-channel data. Creative solutions with Studio offers a complete solution to build and manage engaging digital ads, from custom video to dynamic creative.
With your campaign in full swing, you may use Google Surveys to generate questions for market research, which is important as it helps you to understand and define your target and audience groups better. It’s simple, too. You ask a question online and people across the internet respond in exchange for access to high-quality content or Google Play credit. The marketer will then get aggregated and analysed results in one simple online interface.
Finally, use Data Studio to build a reporting solution for sharing data from almost any source via interactive dashboards and reports. The sky’s the limit here, as various connectors may be used to build almost any data sets and data combinations required.
Insights
With Google Marketing Platform, everything you need for end-to-end control of your marketing campaigns is available and, when linking and using these products together, it provides powerful insights with world-class tech abilities.
See also
Tasmin Kingma is the chief operating officer at Hoorah Digital and leads operational and media strategy. She is results-driven, with a strong focus on building data lead by technology. She built one of the first programmatic teams in South Africa.
“Motive” is a by-invitation-only column on MarkLives.com. Contributors are picked by the editors but generally don’t form part of our regular columnist lineup, unless the topic is off-column.
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