Google's Growing Enterprise Analytics Suite: Ready to Tackle Adobe?

2 min read
Anyone who regularly visits the Google Analytics login page will have noticed their navigation bar has grown rapidly over the past 12 months.

Along with a subtle name change from 'Google Analytics' to 'Google Analytics Solutions' and a swathe of new offerings to bulk out their Analytics 360 suite, it's fair to assume that Google has been lining up for a big swing at Adobe' Marketing Cloud suite for a while. 
* Adobe Analytics was formerly called SiteCatalyst - the flagship web analytics product by Omniture, which Adobe acquired in 2009.

So what's next? Is Google's Analytics Suite ready to tackle Adobe in the Enterprise space?

The Navigation Changes

Visually it's clear to see Google's new expanded products and scope of offerings:

Google's growing navigation bar (image courtesy of http://archive.org/web/ )

Note: Google's 'Adometry' (or was it 'Adobetry'?) was also renamed to 'Attribution 360'. 

Google Makes a Move

If it looks like things happened quickly - it did. Of course, Google is not exactly known for being slow. Before the navigation changes - around mid last year a host of new offerings aggressively appeared as beta products.
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These have now taken their seat as fully fledged products in some shape or form.

Mid-2016 shot of Google's beta products (courtesy http://archive.org/web/)

Why the move?

It's no secret that digital marketing is becoming more data driven by the minute. It makes sense for Google to expand a wider selection of familiar, easy-to-use (and some completely free) products and tie these in with their existing Analytics suite.
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It certainly seems that larger/enterprise companies who currently use a disjointed collection of software - for example, Optimisely for A/B testing or Qualaroo for user surveys - have at least one all-in-one alternative to Adobe's Marketing Cloud for consideration.

The 8 products currently making up Adobe's 'Marketing Cloud'

What's Next?

The secret of Adobe's success to date seems to be in it's enterprise users.
While Google Analytics has 7x more users, Adobe Analytics sells to bigger companies. This would appear then, to be the ground that Google needs to make gains on.

Is Google ready to tackle Adobe yet? It's hard to say. We'd love to hear your feedback.

One thing for sure - it will be interesting to see how thing continue to play out over the coming months.

Further reading: Why Google Analytics Has Not Killed Adobe Analytics (…Yet)