The Google Marketing Platform Summit 2018 was held at San Francisco earlier this month, bringing exciting announcements for the digital marketing community across the globe. It’s an invitation-only conference, held annually in California, destined to GMP Partners across 63 countries. Vinicius Tsugi, who leads the Analytics team at Catchi, was there to check all the newest product features and exchange ideas with Google’s product and partner teams.
This was the first conference since the Google Analytics 360 partnership rebranded as the Google Marketing Platform (GMP), which consolidated both Google Analytics and DoubleClick products under a common platform.
In between keynotes and breakout sessions, GMP Summit attendees had an opportunity to meet with product teams on the demo booths, and discuss the latest features and use cases across different industries. It’s a perfect opportunity to understand how each product team works under the GMP suite.
All content and sessions are under NDA, so we are not able to disclose much about what was announced in terms of the upcoming product features, however, we can say many keynotes highlighted the best results were achieved when analytics with ad platforms were integrated. Google Marketing Platform now integrates measurement and advertising across its 7 products (Google Analytics 360, Tag Manager 360, Data Studio, Optimize 360, Search Ads 360, Display & Video 360 and Surveys).
Another key takeaway is that brands see a significant increase in consumer engagement and ROI when the experience is tailored to their preferences. This can be achieved, for example, by creating personalized experiences in Google Optimize 360 for each customer or campaign segment. Multiple conditions can be used to build those segments, such as demographics, location, traffic source, device, interactions on the website. On more advanced use cases, other data sources such as transactional history data and CRM customer segments can be integrated to GA360 and Optimize 360 to enable a customized website experience.
Apart from the two-day conference, we were fortunate to participate in some private sessions with product managers and engineers to discuss potential next features, and to take part in the Immersion Day at Google San Francisco Office, where we could go deeper with product teams, check what is in their product roadmaps and exchange ideas.
In the end, it was a very inspiring and exciting time in the GMP Summit. We’re already looking forward to next year!