Google Marketing Platform is a data management platform (DMP) specializing in online advertising and analytics for enterprises and small businesses.
As an extension of other Google advertising tools, such as Google AdsGoogle Marketing Platform consolidates marketing and advertising activities and makes it easier to manage and automate processes.
This review provides an in-depth look at Google Marketing Platform, some of its most common use cases, and its competitors in advertising data management:
See another Google product review: Google Cloud Artificial Intelligence (AI) Portfolio Review
Google and the DMP marketplace
Google’s marketing platform sits between two different business technology markets: the data management platform market and the marketing analytics market. Both of these markets are growing as companies pursue new business goals with big data and digital marketing in mind.
The data management platform market reached approximately $2.15 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach $5.65 billion by 2027, according to a report by Maximize market research. Marketing analytics software market reached $2.83 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach $7.43 billion by 2027, according to a report by Grand View Search.
While this platform serves a specialized need for enterprise-level ad buying and analytics that some businesses require, it is a marketplace with several other vendors offering ads, targeting , marketing campaigns and large-scale customer analytics. Some of the major Google Marketing Platform competitors include:
- Adobe Advertising Cloud
- Amazon DSPs
- Adzoom
- Oracle Blue Kai
- theTradeDesk
- Salesforce CDP
- MediaMath
- Marketing 360
- bonsai
Learn more about the data management market.
Key Features of Google Marketing Platform
Depending on whether your team decides to pursue the enterprise or small business version of Google Marketing Platform, you will be able to access various key features for digital advertising, data management, and analytics:
Enterprise version features:
- Analytics 360
- 360 Campaign Manager
- Display and 360 video
- Optimize 360
- 360 Search Ads
- 360 Surveys
- 360 Tag Manager
Small business version features:
- Analytic
- Data Studio
- Investigations
- To optimise
- Tag Manager
Discover the best analytics solutions: Best Data Analysis Tools and Data Analysis Software
Key Benefits of Google Marketing Platform
Google Marketing Platform offers its customers several advantages when it comes to digital advertising, including:
- Flexible scaling: Users can purchase the entire platform or individual components depending on their use cases.
- Universal Video Campaigns: Through Google’s investment in multiple video and digital media platforms, targeted video features and analytics help businesses that want to optimize their video advertising experiences.
- Improved Analytics: With the Google Analytics backbone and several other built-in analytics, Google Marketing Platform makes it easy for businesses to measure the success of advertising campaigns. The platform also simplifies the dashboard by hosting all this information in one place.
- Automation and connectivity: This platform offers several Opportunities for campaign and targeting automationand it also goes beyond the basics found in other Google tools with advanced API functionality.
Google Marketing Platform Use Cases
Google Marketing Platform is designed to help businesses manage traditional ad buying, targeting, and analysis, but it’s not just for product vendors who want to advertise their products. Other use cases include helping organizations target their messages to the most relevant digital audiences.
Learn how two different organizations and business models used Google Marketing Platform to achieve their digital audience management goals:
“Data Studio can help you understand e-commerce history as a whole or at extreme granularity by using intuitive data modeling to illustrate a wide range of KPIs.” -Mark Estrada, Global Head of Omnichannel and UX Operations for Lucky Brand, google marketing platform review
“UNICEF USA’s business can be highly segmented due to the many types of emergencies and topics we respond to, ranging from preventing childhood illnesses to providing emergency relief in times of crisis. We wanted an integrated platform that could help us ensure we were getting the right message across to people responding to our various charitable efforts. -Tobes Kelly, Director of Digital Revenue for UNICEF, google marketing platform review
“Google Marketing Platform enables DELVE to identify and market only to audiences most likely to respond to UNICEF USA’s message and, conversely, stop spending media dollars on audiences least likely to respond. a donation.” -Anton Lipkanu, media manager for DELVE, a Google Marketing Platform partner that worked with UNICEF on the implementation of the platform
Benefits of Google Marketing Platform
Based on user reviews and comparisons with platform competitors, the main advantages of Google Marketing Platform are:
- Solutions for small and large businesses: This product offers two different product packages to meet the different needs of enterprises and small businesses, which provides flexibility in cost and functionality.
- Customizability: This tool is considered customizable, especially when focusing on its analytics dashboards and data visualization features.
- Integrated information: The platform is made up of several individual advertising and analytics components, but the Integration Center offers integrated information about all of these individual modules.
- Tag Manager: Many users praise the tag management feature and its metadata capabilities.
- Apis: Google Marketing Platform offers several easy-to-deploy API integrations.
- Automating: This product includes several useful automation features, such as automatic bidding.
Manage your metadata: Main metadata management tools
Disadvantages of Google Marketing Platform
Based on user reviews and comparisons with platform competitors, the main disadvantages of Google Marketing Platform are:
- Pricing: Although pricing is not mentioned on their site, some reviewers say that more advanced components can be prohibitively expensive to implement.
- User interface: Some users comment on the complexity of the user interface. Some of their targeted comments relate to the Campaign Manager menu and the difficulty of using and opening certain menu bars on a single screen.
- Integration of social networks: Google Marketing Platform offers several social media integrations, but some users say setting up the integrations is difficult.
- Data synchronization frequency: Some users are expressing a desire for more frequent syncing with Google Ads and other data platforms for more consistent metrics.
- Campaign search: The campaign feature allows search in its search bar, but it is limited to certain types of queries and URLs.
- Campaign portfolio management: A few customers are reporting difficulties with campaign archiving in particular.
Find other digital marketing solutions that meet the needs of small businesses: The best digital marketing tools
Google Marketing Platform Reviews
For a more comprehensive look at customer reviews on Google Marketing Platform, check out these aggregated user ratings from multiple user review sites:
Google Marketing Platform Cost
Some tools and modules, such as Google Analytics, are free, which is useful for small businesses that want a lower start-up cost for advertising. With both small and large business solution paths already in place, clients also have curated cost packages that match the size and complexity of their advertising models.
Most individual components and the entire marketing platform do not have prices listed on the site. To fully understand Google Marketing Platform pricing, potential customers should contact the sales team for a quote. Some features offer free trials to get started.
conclusion
Google Marketing Platform is a leading solution for businesses that build their entire reputation and revenue on advertising at scale. Google is one of the leading providers of the digital advertising space, and particularly with its acquisitions over the years, the company offers the sophisticated tools and complementary platforms needed to grow your digital voice.
However, it’s important to remember that many other high-quality Google advertising and analytics tools, such as Google Ads and Google Analytics, are available as individual products. Many companies may not need all the features of this platform. So do your research and firmly establish your budget before choosing a comprehensive platform such as Google Marketing Platform.
Read next: Best Data Management Platforms and Software