While you were enjoying your lazy summer, Google’s product teams got together to make a new suite (yes, again) for all the Google Analytics-related products. Many of the products you use, know and love (or love to hate), are now renamed and merged into a unified platform. Effectively, they’re trying to make it easier to integrate everything together, immersing the Analytics experience in all the ad products in the name of transparency and control.
For those of us who have been in these ad and analytics spaces since the beginnings, this is a welcome change from having to link accounts the old way. But what’s with all the name changes and logos every few years? Really, Google?
If you haven’t checked out the products menu in your Analytics or ad platforms lately, it looks a bit different.
Here’s what’s changed…
Well, if you hadn’t seen them before, Optimize, Data Studio and Surveys have new logos. Of course there’s also the new Search Ads 360 (formerly DoubClick Search) and Display & Video 360 – a combined product of the former DoubleClick Bid Manager, Campaign Manager and Studio and Audience Center products.
Google AdWords has rebranded to simply Google Ads. It still features the traditional text ads we all have grown accustomed to in search results and the ads in both display and video formats. But now the options have been expanded. From Google themselves:
The new Google Ads brand represents the full range of advertising capabilities we offer today””on Google.com and across our other properties, partner sites and apps””to help marketers connect with the billions of people finding answers on Search, watching videos on YouTube, exploring new places on Google Maps, discovering apps on Google Play, browsing content across the web, and more
Additionally, DoubleClick Bidmanager is now called Google Display & Video 360. If that 360 part sounds familiar, it’s borrowed from the previous Analytics 360 suite name.
The platform also creates a unified platform bringing DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) and DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX) into a singular product called Google Ad Manager. The multi-platform experience should, according to Google, be a unified ad platform for everything from mobile app developers to video publishers.
Google Ad Manager will also allow for newer ad formats, including dynamic ad insertion on both live and on-demand video, YouTube, Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) publishers and even Apple News.
Google Ads vs. Display & Video 360
The unified Google Ads platform will allow you to produce display ads across the Google Display Network you’re accustomed to, YouTube and Gmail Ads. The Display & Video 360 let’s you connect to the Google Display Network and YouTube, but includes all other AdExchanges, utilizing real-time bidding and private marketplaces (PMPs). Programmatic Audio Campaigns are also still available. Display & Video 360 also includes the largest number of choices for display ad formats.
Both platforms allow TrueView in-stream ads, video discovery ads, bumper ads and out-stream ads. However Display & Video 360 allows for pre-, mid- and post-roll ads as well as vertical video.
New products, new blogs
Of course all this reorganization brings change to how the product teams will now communicate with the digital marketing professionals of the world. The Google Marketing Platform Blog was launched to provide the latest updates and news from the Marketing Platform Product team. While the team says they’ll keep the Google Analytics Solutions blog around for reading older posts, all new posts will be on the site Marketing Platform blog. There’s also a new Twitter account, @GMktgPlatform, LinkedIn page and YouTube channel to make sure you stay up on all the media the unified product teams will be consuming.
Fear not, all the previous Google Analytics social channels are still available (even their Google+ page).
