Good enough? A closer look at Google’s Analytics 360 Suite for enterprise marketers

Google recently announced that it is launching a new product for enterprise marketers to directly challenge Adobe’s Marketing Cloud and similar services.

According to a report in TechCrunch, the Google Analytics 360 Suite will combine Google Analytics Premium (now called Google Analytics 360) and Adometry (which it acquired in 2014 and is now called Attribution 360), with an enterprise-class version of Google’s Tag Manager and three new products (Audience Center 360, Data Studio 360 and Optimize 360) into a single solution for marketers.

The fact that Google is making this investment further validates how critical A/B testing and multivariate testing are for the enterprise. However, this offering fails to deliver on the fundamental needs of the largest site operators. As with any other tag-based offering, they will have the same constraints over speed (tags slow down page load times), flexibility (this is still about front-end look and feel, vs. full stack front-to-back end like SiteSpect), and scalability (the volume and complexity of A/B tests that can be created and deployed).

The question is: how legitimate is this offering? While this could potentially be competitive to any tag-based offering in this space (particularly Optimizely), it’s really just more of the same. Google is taking a handful of “good enough” tools, putting them together in a suite and calling it a solution. While their analytics product is very good, it’s doubtful that the Optimize (A/B testing) product is much different or offers any type of advantage over traditional tag-based offerings.

In your current A/B testing practice, if you’re: