Google Announces the Google Analytics 360 Suite | Hacker News Reader

Google Announces the Google Analytics 360 Suite

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98 pointsdpurp48 comments

Worth clarifying that this is just a packaging (repackaging?) of their enterprise products, presumably to make it easier for them to sell it to enterprise users.

Attempting to log into the Google 360 Suite shows this message:

> Gaining Access to the GA 360 Suite Thank you for your interest in the Google Analytics 360 Suite. If you’d like to learn more about the Suite, please contact us.

> If you use Google Analytics Premium, Adometry by Google, Google Analytics, or Google Tag Manager today, you may login using the links below:

> Google Analytics Premium

> Adometry by Google

> Google Analytics

> Google Tag Manager

Clicking on Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager goes to the usual logins for those products, with no noticeable changes in features or branding.

TL;DR - Unless you're a Google Analytics Premium customer (which starts at $150k per year, by the way), you're not affected.

This is not a repackaging as far as I can tell. There are 3 new products here: Audience Center, Data Studio, and Optimize[0].

[0] http://searchengineland.com/google-analytics-360-suite-launc...

[0] http://techcrunch.com/2016/03/15/google-announces-analytics-...

When you say $150K per year is that a fee? Or does that mean if you are spending over $150K in ads?

A fee. It's roughly in line with what you'd pay for something like Adobe's high end analytics suite, etc.

Data Studio looks like a natural extension of their popular Analytics add-on for Google docs. Combine it with Google App scripts and it was natural for them to package it into a product. I use both and it's great.

I see at least one exception: Optimize 360.

Google Analytics used to offer the ability to run very rudimentary experiments. If they now provide a point-and-click, WYSIWYG solution comparable to Optimizely and Maxymizer, then this is a pretty interesting move for them and big competition for any players in the split testing and personalization space.

This is nice and all, but I think sidesteps probably the biggest challenge that Google Analytics currently faces which is that they are being blocked more and more by AdBlockers [1].

If you're using the default uBlock setup or checked the radio button on the ADP install page to "stop trackers" then you're blocking Google Analytics as well.

As others have noted, pricing starts at $150k per year for a solution that will (depending on the propensity of your site visitors to use AdBlock) under report your legitimate traffic by 15-25%.

1 - https://www.blockerwall.com/blockerreport/google_analytics_a...

But what's the prevalence of people installing ad blockers? None of my non-techie friends do it, and many of my techie friends willfully choose not to (moral reasons).

Edit: I'll answer that for myself: as of 2015, about 15% of US internet users had ad blocking software[1]. Much higher than I expected.

[1] https://blog.pagefair.com/2015/adblock-explorer/

depends on your public. If you target young males (video game for instance), you can expect ~30% block IIRC.

Blocking ads isn't just moral, it is imperative. Capitalism is an evolutionary force that selects for the most profitable business practices. Advertising allows businesses to buy profitable changes in behavior. If you understand why we fear biological superbugs, it should be clear why you should keep capitalist superbugs away. Advertising is destined to evolve into a perfect tool for behavior change. If it hasn't already.

Propaganda for fun, for profit, and for political gains dates a lot earlier than modern advertising.

And so does combating it.

Ads aren't going anywhere - there is too much money riding on it. I am willing to bet all that I possess that ads will be with us 20 years from now.

Your comparison with superbugs is apt: ads will evolve into hardier, less blockable forms (native ads, and as soon as someone figures it out, serving ads from the same domain as content)

Native ads are less likely to be malware vectors no?

Yeah... Or maybe it's just a (sometimes annoying) part of a market which, despite its flaws, has created the largest reduction in human suffering ever.

More and more people are using blockers. The problem is that the utility of the software is high, so the number of users installing ad blockers (Which is really easy. Thanks Chrome!) is going to outpace the number of users not using ad blockers. Depending on your demographics, over 50% of your traffic might be using an ad blocker. I recall reddit reporting numbers of over 80% in some instances.

I did some testing earlier this year on a well trafficked YC companies site (so something with a pretty technical audience) and it was around 40% Ad Blocking and half of that analytics blocking.

The overall portion of a sites visitors doing blocking is all over the place (from 10-50%), but the Ad / Analytics blocking ratio has been pretty steady at around half.

As blocker users shift from ADP to uBlock (for performance or b/c they don't like 'acceptable ads') I suspect that ratio to really go up.

That's Adobe's Marketing Cloud killer. And they announce it a week before the largest Adobe event (Summit 2016).

From your lips to gods ears.

Why? As long as the price range of Google stays as it is I see no danger for Adobe. And as long as Google doesn't even provide an easily accessible API for raw data (or configurable multi dimension data export) I see no danger there. Did I mention classifications not costing additional dimensions/variables?

On the other hand I hope Adobe takes a very close look at API performance, segmentation et al.

Both tools have their strength and weak spots. Both might be the right tool for the right cient/company/use case. As always it depends on the circumstances.

Disclaimer: As an analyst I work with both tools. And the more I do I prefer Adobe Analytics.

PS. : The same goes for the respective tagmanager solutions.

I just have too many bald patches from working with Omniture. It's brilliantly convoluted to work with.

If they put 1/10th the effort into Google Webmaster Tools or the AdWords Control Panel I'd be inclined to spend more money with Google. Based on my current experience of their other apps: no dice.

>If they put 1/10th the effort into Google Webmaster Tools or the AdWords Control Panel I'd be inclined to spend more money with Google. Based on my current experience of their other apps: no dice.

Unless you're planning on spending $150,000+/year on analytics alone, the sad fact is that I doubt they care.

I've come to believe that some Google interfaces (eg. AdWords, Webmaster Tools) suck because then you need one of their certified partners to set things up.

By no means they are meant to be used by normal people. Also, data provided by Adwords is a bit limited and you need another tool to better track your hits

I disagree. Google's Webmaster Tools are not really that complex, and while the UI could use some polishing here and there, it works just fine.

AdWords has way more features, of course. However, it's still pretty usable in my opinion, especially when you consider the amount of accessible data.

You say "there's not enough data" and "it's not for normal people" at the same time. While these are not entirely mutually exclusive, the more data you want accessible, the more difficult it becomes to categorize, display and visualize this data.

> You say "there's not enough data" and "it's not for normal people" at the same time. While these are not entirely mutually exclusive, the more data you want accessible, the more difficult it becomes to categorize, display and visualize this data.

They are different complaints. Adwords is usable after you understand how it works, but the whole process of setting up a campaign or migrating from the Keyword Planner to AdWords is not a piece of cake. They even send AdWords ads by mail to businesses, like anyone can setup an effective AdWords campaign, but it's not that easy to get started with the tool. On the other hand, I know that it's a different beast, but FB ads are really simple to setup.

Google Webmaster Tools's UI it's not difficult to use per se, but the UX is quite bad on average and I just wonder why Google won't improve it.

There are parts of the Adwords interface that "suck" because they intentionally try to hide certain things to maximize revenue. For example, getting advertisers to buy ads globally rather than just the US.

On the other side, the Adwords interface is far better than any other ad platform interface I have seen. They could simply it by removing targeting options, and probably increase overall revenue, but it would not be a good deal for the advertisers.

> There are parts of the Adwords interface that "suck" because they intentionally try to hide certain things to maximize revenue.

I admit that I have the same feeling

For me the full fledged A/B testing as well as personalization engine https://www.google.co.in/analytics/360-suite/optimize/ is the highlight of this launch. Seems like they are now coming with full fledged A/B test UI editor here instead of just distributing traffic to different url's.

Google is stepping on Optimizely's, Test & Target and other's here

Google's (discontinued) Website Optimizer was capable of conducting multivariate tests. Required raw code, though. Looks like the new tool indeed has a new visual editor.

For something that is directed towards marketing, why is it so hard for them to just market it in a way that potential customers could understand what they get?

You're just not fluent in enterprise :)

I have a strong immune system ;)

Interesting feature release even though it doesn't impact many of us (e.g. 150k/yr buy-in). I'm very curious to see exactly what level of personalization and per-user optimization their Optimize360 suite offers. I think this is the sort of thing that is going to take enterprise testing to the next stage and probably give Optimizely and VWO a very hard time.

Also, side note, did Google borrow the 360 branding from Adobe or the other way around? http://www.adobe.com/marketing-cloud/web-analytics.html (see: Adobe Customer360)

Optimizely and especially VWO are not the same class of products.

Could you expand on it a bit?

Seems like this is an enterprise solution not really relevant for most users.

Audience Center sounds potentially intriguing if they open up an API to allow you to integrate your own backend data.

They must, that's the whole point of any DMP. You import your 1st,2nd and buy 3rd party data.

White text on a yellow background? What are they thinking...

It draws your attention away from the fact that the gushing testimonial is from Nest, a Google/Alphabet subsidiary.

If somebody from the relevant departments at google reads this: Please allow export of GA data to BigQuery for non premium accounts.

You can export your GA data to Google Spreadsheets and then just use BigQuery inside your spreadsheet.

That's not the same at all.

And have sampling and max 10000 results. Totally what I expect from a raw data export. Great though for everyday custom reporting.

> The Google Analytics 360 Suite integrates with other Google solutions like AdWords

And that's exactly why I'd rather not.

Can they work with my server logs yet?

There's this: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection... https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...

Not exactly working with your logs, but easy enough to write your own parse/upload data script.

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