#77 All things SA360, DV360, CM360 and GA4 (with Alexis Nicolas @ brīt klik)
This week Dan and Dara are joined by Alexis Nicolas from brīt klik. They discuss the reasons why companies would want to move beyond just using Google Ads to use Google’s Campaign Manager 360 (CM360), Search Ads 360 (SA360) and Display & Video 360 (DV360), and how Google Analytics 4 (GA4) fits into it all too.
Enrolment is now open for June’s cohort of the GA4 Immersion 6-week cohort training with early bird pricing for 25% off!
Check out brīt klik on their website and Alexis over on LinkedIn.
Google announcing the (delayed) deprication of 3rd party cookies in 2024 can be read here.
The blog post from Avinash Kaushik on “The 10 / 90 Rule for Magnificent Web Analytics Success” can be read here.
The announcement from Google on BigQuery data clean rooms is here.
Acronym reference sheet:
- GMP = Google Marketing Platform
- GCP = Google Cloud Platform
- DV360 = Display & Video 360
- SA360 = Search Ads 360
- CM360 = Campaign Manager 360
- DMP = data management platform
- DSP = demand side platform
- ADH = Ads Data Hub
- PAIR = Publisher Advertiser Identity Reconciliation
- CPM = cost per mile (1,000 impressions)
- ETL = extract transform load
- API = application programming interface
In other news, Alexis gets out on the slopes!
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Intro music composed by Confidential – check out their lo-fi beats on Spotify.
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Let us know what you think and fill out the Feedback Form, or email podcast@measurelab.co.uk to drop Dan and Dara a message directly.
Quote of the episode from Alexis:
“…what GA4 has unlocked is the BigQuery exports, and all these tools (CM, DV, SA) do have data transfer service enabled, so you’re able to pull that data daily without code into BigQuery and then try to match this data with other types of data.”
Quote of the episode from Alexis:
“…and very often I hear advertisers having SA360 or DV360 and saying, I don’t see the value. Well, it’s because they don’t have the GMP experts behind it, or they’re not necessarily looking for answers in their data, they’re just looking for incremental revenue. All these systems require hard work unfortunately…”
Quote of the episode from Dan:
“…we have a similar conversation with people around GA360, and it’s like, well why would I spend this much money a year on software? I was like, wel, if you’re asking that question, it’s probably not worthwhile.”
Transcript
The full transcript is below, or you can view the Google Doc.
Intro
[00:00:15] Dara: On today’s episode, we’re joined by Alexis Nicolas from brīt klik, who are a Canadian, GMP, paid media consultancy. We talk about the reasons why a company would move beyond just using Google Ads to use Campaign Manager, SA360, DV360, as well as talking about things like Ads Data Hub and data clean rooms in general.
[00:00:34] Daniel: This episode comes with a reference guide for all the acronyms that we are going to be using. So, check out the show notes for additional links to everything that Alexis and we talk about explaining the acronyms of course, and obviously details around brīt klik and Measurelab’s services around the GMP and GCP. Enjoy the show.
[00:00:51] Dara: Hello and welcome back to The Measure Pod, a podcast for analytics and data enthusiasts. I’m Dara, I’m CEO at Measurelab.
[00:00:58] Daniel: And I’m Dan, I’m a consultant and trainer at Measurelab.
[00:01:01] Dara: We’re also joined today by Alexis Nicolas from brīt klik, who are a GMP, paid media consultancy. So Alexis, firstly thanks for agreeing to take some of your time to come on and talk to Dan and I on the show, and welcome.
[00:01:15] Alexis: Thanks for the initiative guys, very glad to be here.
[00:01:17] Dara: We’re excited to have you. So what we always do when we’ve got a guest on is we let them introduce themselves. That way they can’t blame us if we do it badly. So in as much or as little detail as you like, Alexis, can you just give our listeners a little bit of your background. So maybe how you got into digital marketing and then leading up to the kind of current day and a little bit about what you’re doing at brīt klik.
[00:01:37] Alexis: Sure, sure. So I started studying physics, it was really hard to be honest. So then I kind of switched to business, and then when I finished university, I found that data within the world of marketing was providing that scientific, but also like creative approach that marketing has. So I kind of felt very comfortable very quickly in it, and then started working in the agency world in media buying. And at some point I figured out that like a lot of the large agencies I worked at had a lot of problems delivering high quality work. And that’s how I kind of decided to, to create my own small consultancy and try to build very experienced small teams in order to help large advertisers, and that’s why we specialised into Google’s enterprise media buying platforms, which are SA360 (Search Ads 360), DV360 (Display & Video 360), and Campaign Manager 360.
Topic
[00:02:27] Dara: I’m going to ask the, some of the obvious questions first and then I’m sure Dan will get very carried away asking maybe some more advanced questions and maybe start talking about how to tie things back to our favourite subject, which is Google Analytics 4. So we work with, and I’m sure consultancies and agencies have a similar kind of mixed client portfolio where there’s mixture of big enterprise clients who probably will be availing of things like SA360, DV360. But then maybe you’ll have your kind of SMEs and smaller businesses who are maybe working with Google Ads. So, can you just kind of give a very initial, high-level overview of maybe what the difference is between just using Google Ads versus using SA360, DV360, and maybe how then Campaign Manager comes into the picture?
[00:03:12] Alexis: Yeah, sure. Google Ads is rather the most known platform that Google offers when it comes to advertising. But the more things get complex and the bigger teams become, and then like tougher and more complex questions are raised, and obviously the privacy component kicks in really quickly. So you do need to have different tools in order to buy or analyse so when it comes to Search Ads 360, it’s basically a paid search management platform for direct response marketers where we can have multiple search marketing platforms such as Google Ads or Baidu or Bing or Yandex, but you all manage it in one place.
[00:03:51] Alexis: So it does save you a lot of time, but it’s also then connected with the rest of your advertising. If you are, let’s say a brand advertiser, and you’re running display and video, then that would be Display & Video 360, which is the same thing. It’s a display and video management platform, or rather evolved marketers that have significant budgets. And CM360 (Campaign Manager 360) is the platform that basically ties SA360 and DV360 together through its own analytics. And why it has its own analytics, it’s because it has view-through reporting that GA4 doesn’t. GA4 is very privacy focused, I don’t know how to call it, but it’s very thorough in order to be able to deliver its product around the world, whatever its impression based reporting is in CM360. So then you’re able to answer questions such as from people that saw I don’t know, video or display who did search for my brand at the end of their media journey. So in order to do that, you really need those three products.
[00:04:53] Daniel: So I have a question Alexis then around the impression tracking. Well, historically impression tracking’s been kind of there from the beginning, right? When it was all possible and able to, impression tracking was kind of easy in a sense. You could track someone viewing an ad on one site, and you can see if they converted this kind of post-view conversion or post-impression conversions. All of that’s become hard, if not impossible, in every platform, in every way. Especially the kind of cross-site tracking in terms of third party cookies have been deprecated in all places, but Chrome. So I’m just wondering, is this at the same limitations? Is it in the same world as all this other stuff where it’s becoming less and less accurate anyway, and once Google turns off third party cookies at the end of next year, is it going to be redundant anyway or is this whole ecosystem got a way of doing impression or post impression action tracking outside of the world of third party cookies, and outside of this world of, you know, the stuff that’s kind of hurting the other display marketing platforms.
[00:05:46] Alexis: Great question. There’s two approaches when trying to look at impression-based reporting. There’s one that’s fairly holistic where you could just use Google marketing enterprise platforms to just say, did people end up searching after viewing an ad without necessarily going too deep into it. Today, cookies allow you to do that. So let’s say with our clients, we do see about 50% of our impressions collect cookies and try and like we’re able to do this kind of high level analysis, but then you could go way, way, way deeper. And you definitely need more complex teams, especially, you know, cloud experts, analytics experts. And then something more advanced you could do with other tools that are really specialised in view through reporting such as Ads Data Hub, which is basically Google’s data clean room. You could see at which point the conversion rate changes based on average frequency of exposure.
[00:06:43] Alexis: In order to do that, you need way more precision. So definitely not able to do that today with cookies. Back in the days we could do that with DMPs (data management platforms) but like you said, that’s not a possibility today. So there are ways of doing things you were able to do in the past in an even more precise way. It just, it needs like many different skills and teams, which is usually hard to get.
[00:07:07] Dara: You mentioned Ads Data Hub there, it’s something we kind of cross paths with from time to time, but not something we know huge amounts about. Could you kind of explain a little bit about how it works and who might use Ads Data Hub?
[00:07:20] Alexis: So, Ads Data Hub is mainly for brand marketers, it’s able to answer I’d say three main questions. So the first one is when I’m a brand advertiser, I want to know what’s my average, you know, reach or frequency. In order to do that, I need a user ID, and Google has a user ID that was previously given through log-level reporting that has been deprecated. So Ads Data Hub holds this user ID. It’s obviously hidden, you can’t see the user ID, but as long as your query has at least 50 users who are able to exactly know how many people your campaigns reach and at which frequency. So that’s the first basic question brand marketers want to know because you are always looking for incremental reach. So in order to do that, you need to know these answers.
[00:08:08] Alexis: Then the second part is audience overlap. So when you’re trying to contact publishers, each publisher tells you how good they are. But in order to get this incremental reach, you have to know what is the audience overlap between different publishers and then you can, you know, make your media plan. And that’s, again, unlocked through user ID. And if we want to go even further there’s PAIR, which is a new solution from Ads Data Hub which is from Google, which is Publisher Advertiser Identity Reconciliation. Because each publisher works with another data clean room.
[00:08:43] Alexis: Let’s say here in the US there’s Habu, there’s LiveRamp. So let’s say if I’m advertiser A and I want to do some lookalike on publisher A, I’ll probably have to use one of those solutions. But companies hate to onboard multiple solutions, it’s already so complex that Google kind of took care of it so that this way you’re able to import other user IDs from other solutions into one single place and conduct this reaching frequency analysis or audience overlap. And then the third part is post-view reporting on first-party data. So, first-party data, be online or offline. So if I’m a legion, an advertiser, I want to know if people that were exposed to an impression bought at the end of the day on a really precise way, or if, let’s say I’m an ecom store with physical stores, I want to know if this branding campaign I deployed, generated in-store sales. So I think that’s the three main things that Ads Data Hub allows you to do with very, very high accuracy.
[00:09:45] Daniel: I think I understand like the whole ecosystem in theory, and I think one of the, one of the questions I’ve always had around this is I think of it in two parts. I’ve got two questions for you, Alexis. One of which is, I find it slightly odd and I don’t if you have any understanding why, or maybe a theory is why something like Google Ads has search display and YouTube video all in one platform. And then if we kind of go to the next level of enterprise, it splits them apart. And so you’ve got search in one platform and then sort of video and display advertising banded together in a different platform. I don’t understand why they decided to split them up as you go bigger. But the second thing is all of this sounds complicated, and we talk about it in terms of enterprise-level marketers, and it’s like companies of a certain size. I mean, how big are we talking, because it sounds like there’s an awful lot of ecosystem to learn, a lot of people to be using this with a lot of skill sets that maybe a lot of people or businesses already don’t kind of have. So like when would you even consider using DV360, SA360? Let alone Ads Data Hub.
[00:10:40] Alexis: The first I think is to be digitally evolved as a business in order to even think about those products. If you haven’t even raised the question, I think maybe Google Ads is great. Then the second part is, you know, a significant marketing budget. Those platforms have fees so if your budget isn’t big enough to justify those fees, then it’s not worth it. And then, you know, like you said, you need GMP experts, but ideally you need, you know, GCP experts or cloud experts because when it comes to offline data, very quickly you’ll need data scientists so you need to be a digitally evolved, significant marketing budget and then have solid analytics and data science teams. So yeah, we’re talking about multimillion budgets and yeah, very, very large teams, both, you know, agency and client side.
[00:11:31] Daniel: If you can’t, I understand, but is there anything you can give us around costs? Like what kind of costs are we talking for these platforms and then what sort of monthly marketing spends in within search or display and video are you talking to make the most value out of these kind of platforms?
[00:11:47] Alexis: Yeah it’s hard to answer this question. From what I’ve seen, if you have at least a million dollars in search and then half a million in programmatic and display, then it starts to make sense. It all depends on data volumes, right? If you want to conduct that very thorough analysis about how many people were exposed from an impression and then generated a sale or, you know, maybe softer conversion. You’ll need like significant amounts of data and in order to do that, it’ll depend on how competitive the market you are in. So if it’s insurance, 1 million will, you know, disappear very quickly. If it’s, you know, less competitive, then you might have enough hits to start leveraging those products. It’s also, if you’re having really developed analytics teams, what GA4 has unlocked is, you know, BigQuery exports and all those tools. CM, DV, SA, they do have data transfer service enabled, so you’re able to pull that data daily without code into BigQuery and then, you know, try to match this data with other types of data. I think it’s more about quantity of data rather than investment. So this is where the competitive component comes in, but the more the better.
[00:13:02] Dara: And do you need all three of those criteria? Or if there’s a company that has the budget, but just wants to say to you, look, as long as you’ve got the resource and you can make this work then go for it. It sounded like from what you were saying, the client really needs to have resource internally as well, it can’t just all be offloaded to an agency.
[00:13:20] Alexis: Yes that is correct. I mean, some agencies are able to pull everything by themselves, but it’s usually for their biggest clients because it is resource intensive. So if an agency is delivering this solution from A to Z, it’s probably going to be for some very, very, very large client. And yes, you do need all three of those and very often I hear advertisers having SA360 or DV360 and saying, I don’t see the value. Well, it’s because they don’t have the GMP experts behind it, or they don’t, you know, they’re not necessarily looking for answers in their data, they’re just looking for, you know, incremental revenue. All these systems require hard work unfortunately, so I do see, even if the companies do have the data or do have the budgets, very often they don’t have the Google Marketing Platform experts, and that’s how we also saw this opportunity in the market.
[00:14:15] Alexis: Because usually those GMP experts are trained by Google. So in order to become one, you need to be working at a big agency or at a very, very big client. And Google is doing all of the heavy lifting in terms of training you, giving you access to betas and understanding the product in order to help large advertisers. And usually within an agency there is one or two resources that are the subject matter experts. So it’s very few people are exposed to the, the latest features or practical deployment of those tech platforms.
[00:14:49] Daniel: There’s a blog post, really kind of old blog post now, but we’re still really valuable from Avinash Kaushik who he had the 10/90 rule, which I bring up all the time. If you’ve got your total investment, 10% is on the tech and software and 90% is on the people to use it, to optimise it, to make the most value from it. So if you’re spending a million a year on the software and the tech, then you know that’s 9 million a year on the people, the optimisation and the process. Especially when you were saying Alexis, about the people that are like, don’t see what the value is in these tools and the software. I mean, you can, you know, we have a similar kind of conversation with people around things like GA360, and it’s like, well, why would I spend this much money a year on a software? Well, I was like, well, if you’re asking that question, it’s probably not worthwhile right. That’s the key thing and I think it’s a nice way of gauging kind of like whether or not they’re ready to kind of spend that money if they’ve got the idea of how they can use it and the people can use it, and getting excited about that opportunity.
[00:15:36] Daniel: I mean, you mentioned something twice now, which is probably the first time a guest has brought this up, but not me, which is Google Analytics 4. And obviously this is kind of my, my happy place and was something I’ve been looking at over the last couple of years. But something that I’ve always found interesting is the conversation or the differences between Campaign Manager 360 and Google Analytics. Google in a sense, within the Google Marketing Platform has two analytics products. And so I’m just wondering if you can help kind of settle the debate of what are they trying to do, what’s happening differently and why would you have both or one of them, and kind of what the, what are the pros and cons?
[00:16:08] Alexis: I probably don’t know exactly myself either, but from my use of all these years, if you’re a brand marketer, the impression is so important in display and video marketing, the average click-through rate is 0.5%, and half of those clicks are accidental. And probably that remaining, you know, 0.25%, it comes from remarketing campaigns because when you see an ad, either a video or image, you’re never going to click on it unless it’s, you know, very close to the sale. And since GA4 doesn’t have view-through reporting, then the brand advertiser is left with almost nothing. You know, like vanity metrics such as CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions), the ability, cost per view, completion rate, video player size. Whereas the direct response marketer, he has a conversion, so for the brand advertiser Campaign Manager is what will explain him which impressions became a sale or a lead, and that’s something you don’t find in GA4.
[00:17:06] Alexis: You used to have it in GA360 back in the day, was one of the sale points was the view through reporting. But slowly they took this out of the map and even like in Ads Data Hub, like we were explaining earlier, in order to link an impression to a click through a user ID, you’d need at least 50 users. So it’s a really, you know, privacy based ruling. And then it’s are you a brand marketer or not? Because if you’re not a brand marketer and you only are a direct response marketer, yes, you might probably not need CM360, neither SA360. Google Ads might as well suffice.
[00:17:44] Daniel: It sounds like this whole ecosystem is very much a Google, the Google walled garden, right? So we can do the view, post view stuff in Ads Data Hub or outside, you know, if we’re sticking within the Google world. So one of the reasons of using someone like DV360 is because you get access to the other networks, right? You get access to the Google Network or for ad space, but you also get access to the other networks. Does the same impression and post-view conversion tracking work across the other networks as well as the Google stuff? Or is, when we’re talking about sort of CM360 and Ads Data Hub, are we only talking about the Google kind of ecosystem?
[00:18:18] Alexis: No, it does work on other publishers, it’s just not cross-device. So when you’re in YouTube, Google knows which email or which other app you connected. So it has really mapped all your devices so it’s really like a device graph. So within Google, if you’re doing a query about audience over overlap between two Google audiences, you’ll really have something very precise. Whereas the other user IDs you’ll get from other publishers are not cross device. So it’s really that old log label data you usually get through a Campaign Manager. So that’s the main difference, but that’s why they created PAIR, right? Because each publisher usually works with a data clean room. Most advertisers when they sign a deal with a publisher, they don’t want all of their audience, they want usually the lookalike of the advertiser’s audience, and that needs a data clean room. And then basically, PAIR is a movement towards there where you’d have really cross-device reporting across Google owned properties, but also other third-party publishers. So it’s going that way at least.
[00:19:26] Dara: You mentioned data clean rooms and you mentioned that Ads Data Hub effectively is a data clean room. There’s an article that went out the end of March saying that Google were introducing BigQuery data clean rooms. How do they interplay with each other if you get what I mean, like is Ads Data Hub going to be absorbed into BigQuery data clean rooms, or are they, are they separate? Is there a separate need for them?
[00:19:47] Alexis: Yeah again, I’m not a hundred percent what they’re going to do there, but I think it’s a response on Amazon’s data clean rooms where Amazon allows you to basically pull from, I think four or five data clean rooms at the same time. So it’s a multi-data clean room environment and that was basically Google response were able to do that as well, because for very long Google was the only player that had a sub-service data clean room. The only way to access Amazon’s or like let’s say Meta’s or Facebook’s data clean room, was by working with Facebook or Amazon directly, so it was really black box. They were giving you data out of nowhere, whereas Ads Data Hub is a self-service product. But then as soon as Amazon came with its own self-service product, it’s also came with this multi data clean room environment. So I feel like it was just a normal answer from Google to catch up on the market.
[00:20:40] Daniel: As a kind of riffing on that, Dara, and I think with a crystal ball out a little bit, I think this is going to be interesting to see how they move with all these different sort of overlapping technologies. And I wonder if they’re going to work towards consolidating some of them. So that Ad Data Hub is a data clean room, data clean rooms are BigQuery, BigQuery are data clean rooms. But also there’s a thing called Analytics Hub, which is part of the GCP too, which is about accessing clean rooms. It’s about sharing, it’s about providing access to your clean room within an organisation, but also externally too. So if I’m, I don’t know, like Criteo for example, I could share different clean rooms with my clients, give them access to the data without copy and pasting data. So in a sense, you’re querying, you’re paying for query time of the data, but you don’t have to pay for storage, and you don’t have to worry about ETL pipelines and all that kind of crazy stuff.
[00:21:23] Daniel: So it’s going to be interesting where Google takes their ecosystem, their data set forward. But I think more broadly, I think there’s an interesting future here, which is about accessing different clean rooms rather than pulling data through APIs and pipelines and saving variations of data in different warehouses. I think, you know, everyone’s got data, just provide secure access to it and query it whenever you need. It’s kind of like the next level beyond the kind of data warehouse, data layer and now maybe just clean rooms is that next step or, I dunno, maybe I’m misinterpreting it, but I think that’s the, an interesting kind of future viewpoint of it. But yeah, I mean obviously Ads Data Hub and all that stuff is the first step.
[00:21:58] Alexis: What’s clear to see is that things have gotten super complex very quickly and advertisers are usually overwhelmed, and I think one of the best moves Google did is, you know, giving GA for free and that’s what unlocked Google Ads basically. And now with GA4, by providing for free, BigQuery exports, I think that they’re hoping for the market to catch up with technology. The possibilities are way beyond the company’s capabilities at the moment, because I think just onboarding new tech is so hard from convincing stakeholders, security, procurement, onboarding, utilisation, support. So I feel like GA4 made a very strategic move there, kind of try to democratise big data and, yeah to make each marketer, know SQL, trying to play more in BigQuery in order to get to that place where everybody’s is playing in a multi-data clean room environment, because we’re definitely not there yet.
[00:22:54] Daniel: I really find it fascinating around this whole idea of you said a couple of times Alexis around this kind of the idea for marketers, and this is part of the Google Marketing Platform and the marketing ecosystem. I mean, half the stuff you’ve been talking about with Ads Data Hub, clean rooms and, you know, this is data science, this is data engineering. I would hazard a guess most marketers probably don’t use SQL to create the data, but then that’s kind of where it drifts into the marketing analyst or the scientist kind of role. I was just wondering, I don’t know from your experience as a GMP consultant, what’s your perspective of around like where that, well, what the role of the marketer is within these kind of larger ecosystems or maybe even into the future. Like what does a marketer look like and I suppose what role would they play?
[00:23:33] Alexis: Again, there’s a big separation in skill needs between the direct response marketer and brand marketer. If you’re just having a regular website, you know, direct response marketing has been democratised through all this, you know, black box automation because of the conversion, such a clear signal. So, all these platforms are able to kind of automate everything for you. On the other hand, brand marketing is so complex and so different, and I think, you know, we didn’t talk about ad fraud in, you know, in programmatic. That’s another whole spectrum of complexity that kicks in when you want to try to, you know, do a brand lift study or search lift study you need very often to work with marketing research firms. And marketing research firms are the ones that we’re always working with confidence interval levels. And, you know, with data now, before it used to be very absolute, and now it has shifted towards confidence interval again. So yeah, if your brand has brand marketing needs and those needs, need to be tied to, you know, direct response marketing outcomes, then you’ll probably need a very thorough marketer.
[00:24:42] Alexis: But if you’re a, you know, very simple product that’s already out there and can live just with search and then, yeah you probably could have your social media manager do also your paid marketing for you. It’s really that brand component that complexifies things and requires all that, at least in media buying I feel, all that tech stack onboarding.
[00:25:05] Dara: And what about, kind of a similar question to you from a consultancy point of view. So Dan’s question was about how kind of, you know, that these lines are blurring more and more between GMP and GCP. So has your kind of skill set, your consultancy skillset, are you seeing that evolve and change and become a lot more technical and pushing a lot more into data science, data engineering as this kind of line continues to blur more and more between the marketing side and the cloud, cloud tech side.
[00:25:35] Alexis: Yeah, a hundred percent. There was already a gap, I feel like between media teams and analytics teams. And then, you know, there’s another gap with cloud teams as well that got created. But you know, I feel like when I just go on LinkedIn now, everybody posts about more and more SQL stuff. So I think it’s quite clear that the old marketer has to be also an analytics specialist, and then the analytics specialist needs to become a cloud specialist. So each profession needs to step it up just because tech has grown so fast. But yeah, I think it’s inevitable for everyone to you know, start reading books and, you know, training and doing GCP or any other Amazon licence just to be able to, to converse with other teams. Because I’ve seen it so many times in agencies where people want to work together, but as soon as they’re in a room, they don’t understand each other and this is where it ends.
[00:26:29] Alexis: So, if the analytic specialist doesn’t understand media buying metrics and, you know, vice versa. Or you know, the media buyer doesn’t understand anything about the cloud, then it’s very hard for them to see common opportunities and work together.
[00:26:44] Daniel: I’m still slightly hung up or thinking about the role of CM360 and just this idea of impression tracking or post-view tracking, and I’m just still trying to understand the way that exists beyond next year. And I’m just wondering, is there a version of this future where there isn’t impressions? I’m just wondering a lot of the kind of communication from Google is like pushing every single person to use Google Analytics 4. And so obviously they’re switching off Universal Analytics, but they’ve just pushed everything over to from a Google Ads perspective, everything’s going over to GA4. You can now build audiences in GA4 from Google Ads. You can now do full multi-channel attribution exports from Google Analytics 4 to Google Ads. Everything’s moving over that way and they’re switching off all of the old tech. I just feel within my analytics bones that the next step is the kind of DoubleClick network, right? It’s the CM360 network, it’s going to be the DV360 and SA360. And so that’s in a sense in the firing line. That’s the next one in the list to kind of be addressed, quote unquote, and move over to the GA4 ecosystem.
[00:27:44] Daniel: I don’t know what that looks like and I don’t know, you know, if they bring over the same functionality, but going into the end of next year, third party cookies won’t exist on any browsers in any meaningful way with or without consent. And I know Google’s looking at different methodologies of doing it, but it’s all going to be kind of behind their secret walled garden, black box, and everything else. Is there a future where CM360 just doesn’t exist in the same kind of viewpoint that it is now and maybe like Google Ads, it’ll just be being fed data from GA4. So GA4 feeds data to Google Ads. Google Ads does its thing with it, right? There’s a view of this where it’s exactly the same for Campaign Manager 360. It’s not doing its own thing, it’s just getting fed data from GA4 and then it’s doing the ad stuff in DV360. No real question there I’m just, I’ve always seen it as the next on the chopping block. I just wanted to get your reaction to that really, what do you think?
[00:28:30] Alexis: Yeah, I mean it makes sense. I don’t know if it’s going to happen, but it could most likely happen. CM is also though an ad server, so this is where you host your creative. So on top of a media analytics platform, it is also a creative hosting platform for display and video. As its display video is a bit more complex than let’s say Google Ads or Meta Ads, not just because you have to work with so many publishers and it’s such an old like industry. So maybe Campaign Manager could just become that ad-serving platform and then, like you said, could be fed, you know, conversions or events through GA4. But then again comes that, you know, impression-level reporting, which is probably going to be only Ads Data Hub, right that you’ll have. They’re probably going to deprecate impression-level reporting in CM once they see that people are starting to onboard Ads Data Hub. But to be honest, I think there’s only a thousand licences used at the moment so they’re really not there yet.
[00:29:28] Alexis: A bit like the, you know, cookies, they did see that the market wasn’t ready for it, so, If I’m spending 10 million dollars in, you know, display and video, and then 15% of that money goes to Google directly for CM and DV360 technology, but then I’m not able to see if those impressions drove a search then I’m probably going to stop investing. And so they’re quite yeah, tied to the platform capability at the moment. So it’d be, yeah, it’s going to be really interesting to see how they kind of keep that impression-level reporting by leveraging, you know, GA4 data and still using maybe CM as an ad server only.
[00:30:10] Daniel: Well yeah, I mean, I feel like that’s how Google Ads is working really. You host all your copy, your creatives in there and then, you know, Google Analytics 4 is powering the measurement and just feeding the results. You can tell Google was sweating about this and last year I think Facebook announced they lost like, was it 10 billion because of the iOS changes and because of the impression tracking and third party tracking. And you know, it’s not because they lost the revenue, it’s they lost the way to measure performance of the ads and give it back to their advertisers and that’s where people get nervous and start pulling spend. So they’re very nervous and that’s probably why one of the main reasons why Google has been pushing back this third party cookie deprecation for like three or four years. But yeah, GA4 has gone all in on machine learning. You know, behavioural modelling, conversion modelling, data-driven attribution modelling. It’ll be interesting to see the the next layer of that.
[00:30:55] Alexis: We touched a little bit on, you know, ad fraud, but CM also has ad verification services, IAS, DoubleVerify mode, like you can connect campaigns, some of it is already there and some of it you can just add additional trackers to kind of, you know, verify fraud levels within programmatic because it’s historically been programmatic’s biggest issue. And then to this day it’s still a shit show to be honest. So it does also have that ad verification component blend into it. So it’s really for, like I said, brand advertisers and it’s hard to have the two do all these things within, you know, GA just like already there, it’s been there for years. So yeah, they’re definitely trying to move things around, and again, programmatics so complex. So that’s the tool they built in years and it works to be honest extremely well.
[00:31:47] Alexis: The only issues, kind of black-box like each Google product, there is other competitors such as The Trade Desk that are kind of selling transparency because there’s so many fees between all these ad networks on top of ad fraud. So, a lot of people are making billions because of such big brand companies such as, you know, Proctor and Gamble will spend, you know, crazy amounts of money without having the time to look at the data. But I think that’s slowly ending throughout this, you know, crazy tech stacks that are, that are out there.
[00:32:19] Daniel: We’re talking about kind of high level budgets, marketing, we can probably think of it in terms of maturity, like marketing maturity and analytics maturity here, like to use these kind of products. Is there something beyond the Google world? Is there other technologies that you would be running alongside something like DV360 or CM360 or SA360. Are we talking about part of an ecosystem here or if you’re kind of in bed with these tools, is that where you’re spending all your money?
[00:32:42] Alexis: Of course I think we didn’t touch on that, but of course if you are a company that has an app and its main goal is to acquire user within an app, It gets even more complex and you probably need to get out of these tools because there’s nothing in these tools that can help you with that. Then if you are an advertiser in ecom, then probably onboarding Amazon DSPs. So the same platform as DV360. But on the Amazon side, we’ll give you, you know, access to networks that aren’t part of DV360. Then if your sole goal is to cut costs between intermediaries within programmatic, you need The Trade Desk because the trade desk will basically tell you whenever you pick an audience, what is the cost of that most fine audience or when you pick different networks and then you are able to optimise that programmatic supply through these kind of solutions. The solutions are endless, what clients really love is that Google each time brings solutions within their stack. Like we said, like, you know, large companies hate onboarding new tech because it’s so complex. But Google has always been in the forefront of integrating new solutions. And having, you know, analytics teams being used to their tools and not having to learn new tools. So I think that has been like, you know, a huge success for Google and it makes sense.
Wind down
[00:34:08] Dara: Couple more questions, Alexis, just to wrap up. The first one is where can people find out more about either you individually or about Brīt Klik if they want to learn more about your services or they want to hear more from you or get in touch with you?
[00:34:20] Alexis: The website, so it’s britklik.com or on LinkedIn, I’m always there, so feel free to reach out.
[00:34:29] Dara: Great, and the last one is the hard one. What do you do outside of work to wind down?
[00:34:34] Alexis: I’m a big outdoor sports enthusiast, I love extreme sports. So, surfing and snowboarding are the two main ones. And I’m really passionate about mental health, so I do try to find yeah, a solution to working hard, but also feeling great. I’ve been trying to create a company where it’s not only me that feel this way, but also my employees. So that’s really something that been driving me for the last few years and also made me create the company because yeah, the large enterprise world provides quite crazy environments where it’s hard to maintain a good, healthy mental state.
[00:35:13] Dara: Completely agree. Yeah, we can definitely, definitely relate to that. And we should tell our listeners as well that when we spoke to you before this podcast you were in, you were in a cabin in Switzerland, that’s got to be very good for your mental health and balancing out the, you know, periods of long work with then getting out into nature and probably switching off a little bit.
[00:35:32] Alexis: Yeah, I try to do more and more remote work since Covid, but I’ve also seen that since Covid, you know, everyone became their own boss. So you do meet more and more interesting people in co-working spaces. So I love the networking part, it’s really inspiring.
[00:35:48] Dara: Great. Well, thank you again Alexis, for coming on and sharing some of your thoughts with us. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.
Outro
Dara: That’s it for this week, to hear more from me and Dan on GA4 and other analytics related topics, all our previous episodes are available in our archive at measurelab.co.uk/podcast. Or you can simply use whatever app you’re using right now to listen to this, to go back and listen to previous episode.
Daniel: And if you want to suggest a topic for something me and Dara should be talking about, or if you want to suggest a guest who we should be talking to, there’s a Google Form in the show notes that you can fill out and leave us a note. Or alternatively, you can just email us at podcast@measurelab.co.uk to get in touch with us both directly.
Dara: Our theme is from Confidential, you can find a link to their music in the show notes. So on behalf of Dan and I, thanks for listening. See you next time.
Daniel Perry-Reed
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Further reading
Customer Data Platforms (CDPs)
Grand Designs: “The Warehouse to CDP conversion”
