Dive Brief:
- Google is bringing personalization and testing tools to a wider audience of marketers with its new, free Google Optimize, as announced in a company blog post Wednesday. The product is a free version of Google Analytics 360, an enterprise-level suite of data and marketing products released in March.
- A new metric was also introduced that leverages machine learning to predict the likelihood of a visitor making a transaction on a marketer’s site or app. It is called Session Quality Score.
- Google is introducing and improving a number of free data products for marketers. Along with Optimize, it’s also upgraded Google Data Studio and introduced 20 new tags to Google Tag Manager.
Dive Insight:
Google is better catering to marketers who might not have the budget for enterprise-class data handling tools or the resources to manage the mountains of data they collect. The move points to how personalization has evolved from being a nice-to-have to a must-have for digital marketers of all sizes.
Google Optimize's free platform could be a huge boon to startups and fledgling initiatives, as any marketer who doesn’t — or can't — take advantage of analytics to turn raw consumer data into useful campaign information is essentially handicapping their entire program.
The new Session Quality Score underscores how machine learning is quickly becoming a standard digital marketing technique.
“As today’s businesses are shifting to compete on customer experience and personalized marketing, we want to give all businesses the tools and access to compete — and ultimately, drive better online consumer experiences,” wrote Babak Pahlavan, senior director of product management and analytics solutions and measurement at Google, in the blog post.
By offering a number of data handling tools at no cost, Google is giving marketers more room for experimentation in testing analytics programs before committing to spend and expansion.
It's a smart move in that it also gives Google a leg up on the competition when marketers do decide to move onto more powerful paid services, since they will already be familiar with Google's user interface and basic functionality.