We live in a world driven by data. Our ability to create, gather, and store data keeps increasing with each passing day. Unsurprisingly, it has led us to question our current decision-making processes as we strive to gain in-depth and actionable insights. In addition, there is data to support this move. According to McKinsey, data-driven companies are 5% more profitable and 6% more productive than those who chose to ignore data.
The biggest challenge facing today’s CMOs is how to make better marketing decisions using data. Their vision and strategy are driven in part by the changes adopted by current and potential customers. A state-of-the-art analytics platform can help you understand and identify these changes beforehand, thus enabling you to create a comprehensive and accurate roadmap for the future.
Launched in 2011, Google Analytics Premium is the most used analytics platform. Listed below are a few things that should impress upon you the importance of including a GA Premium migration in your roadmap.
The Google Marketing Platform
Google Analytics offers a set of powerful media buying tools that enable you to not only get a complete view of your customers but also connect with them at the opportune moment.
DoubleClick Campaign Manager – The core of the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, DCM enables you to manage your display campaigns efficiently and conveniently. It offers robust features for serving to target and reporting of ads across any channel.
DoubleClick Bid Manager – Can you imagine buying display media from various exchanges in real-time on a single platform? That is what the DoubleClick Bid Manager is all about.
DoubleClick Search – Managing extensive search campaigns on Google AdWords and Microsoft AdCenter can be a tall and exhausting task. DoubleClick Search makes it much simpler and faster as it uses Google’s infrastructure and is integrated with the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform.
Your first-party data and digital properties are stored on Google’s secure cloud platform. In addition, Google offers third-party data from multiple vendors that are integrated tightly with the platform. As a result, you have a complete view of all your data in real-time at any time.
The Only Source of Truth – Reporting
For online marketers, the objective is to derive maximum value from advertising and optimize future returns based on the observations of the current campaign. Hence, it becomes critical for marketers to be able to visualize their data in many different ways. Keeping this in mind, GA Premium offers a comprehensive reporting system that will help marketers acquire greater insight into their strategies and tactics.
The Report Builder forms a vital component of GA Premium’s reporting platform. You can use Report Builder to create and manage campaign reports as per your exact specifications. For instance, you can measure end-to-end campaign effectiveness or the view-through visits. You can also report on data from key DoubleClick products like DoubleClick Search. Unlike other reporting tools, you will not have to invest much time or effort into aggregating reports or aligning your data according to a specific format. You will have all the control you will ever need to get the insights you need quickly within the UI itself.
Enterprise-Level Capability
It does not matter how much you are expecting to grow in the near future. As a premium customer, you will get all the help your business needs to thrive. GA Premium runs on Google’s reliable and secure technology infrastructure, which gets used every day by the billions of internet users. What this means is that your business can grow as rapidly as it can without worrying about downtime or even a marginal impact on services.
Premium vs. Standard Feature Comparison on scalability ground:
Custom Variables – Premium customers have 200 custom variables for reporting whereas Standard users have only 20 custom variables.
Fresher data – Premium user can access data much faster as they have SLA of 4 hours. Standard users have SLA of 48 hours.
Data limits – Standard users can track only 10 million hits per month while Premium users can track 1 billion to 20 billion hits in the same span.
Greater custom accuracy for Premium customers – Up to 200 times more compared to Standard user.
Bigger data exports – The solution allows larger data exports for Premium customers. The Premium users get the capability to export unlimited BigQuery raw data.
Measure What Matters
Better measurement is the need of the hour if we want to track accurately the complex journey of today’s customer. We need to not only choose the right metrics but also focus on the right customers and value their whole journey to the point they make a purchase. GA Premium offers comprehensive tools to help you:
Analyze behavior
Segmentation on any stage (example – abandonment sessions)
Analysis on attributes and categorization
Execution through remarketing lists
Understand your customers
Analyze users across the lifetime of the customer
Measure user retention rates
Measure cross device
Identify unique customers by assigning a unique ID to them at the time of identification (login, for example)
If the system detects the same unique ID on several devices or browsers, it will classify them as one unique visitor
Understand the lifecycle of your products
What are the most popular products?
Which products are abandoned frequently in the shopping cart?
Which products are converting into sales the most?
Measure Lifetime Value Analysis
Across five LTV Reporting Metrics – Revenue LTV, Sessions LTV, Duration LTV, Goal Completion LTV, and Transactions LTV
Across four LTV Dimensions – Channel, Source, Medium, and Campaign
Data Rights
In the Information Age, data ranks as one of the most critical resources for any business. Google complies with all international regulations on data ownership and security, thereby building customer confidence in the brand and its products. They adopt a multi-layered security strategy across the organization to guarantee the integrity and confidentiality of the data stored in their systems.
The Intellectual Property Rights for all data specific to a web property belongs to the owner of the said property. Even for the Ad tech stack (DoubleClick), the customer – and not Google – owns the data. This policy covers integrations across the stack. GA Premium does not capture Personal Identifiable Information (PII). In the event of this occurrence, the data is deleted.
Join and Export Data Sets with Big Query
A revolution in the database industry, BigQuery allows you to analyze enormously large datasets with blazing performance. The most fantastic part of this service is that you do not need to invest in any infrastructure or even a database administrator. It is the preferred analytics platform for organizations of various hues and can help you unravel hidden insights about your customers.
The main applications of BigQuery are:
Join Data Sets at Scale – When dealing with large datasets, it can be challenging and time-consuming to extract meaningful insights. BigQuery simplifies data analysis by allowing users to merge data from two large tables to produce an insightful result set
Export Data – You can export your data in several formats after you have loaded the same into BigQuery. The daily limit is 1,000 exports up to 10 TB. The maximum size per file is 1 GB.
Join External Data – While your GA Premium data is undoubtedly invaluable stuff, you can make it truly priceless by combining it with third-party data. In doing so, you can find the last piece of the puzzle that could provide you with virtually unlimited insights
Analyze Big Data – BigQuery is the perfect platform for analyzing Big Data as it offers powerful tools to process and analyze large data sets.
To Conclude
Google Universal Analytics provides all the basic ammunition that a company needs when it starts to analyze digital data, but to move ahead in the journey and leverage the power of data to the fullest Google Analytics Premium is a great solution that offers extreme capabilities for all types of analytics that a marketer might need.