Making Digital Maturity a Reality with GMP & GCP

Companies with high digital maturity are twice as likely to grow their market share (1). This makes digital maturity an imperative for marketers. But faced with intensifying performance requirements, increasing privacy regulation, and non-stop technical innovation (not to mention a whole new world of AI opportunities), marketers are often challenged to advance their digital maturity.

The good news is that the combined power of Google Marketing Platform (GMP) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offers clear and tangible opportunities for marketers to elevate capabilities and drive performance.  

In this post we’ll provide a brief introduction to GMP and GCP with a focus on how an integrated approach enables digital maturity by unlocking advanced capabilities around real-time campaign optimization, 1PD media activation, and AI-powered performance and personalization.

GMP & GCP: FIRST THINGS FIRST

Before you can understand how GMP and GCP work together to fuel digital maturity and performance, you must first understand their power individually.  

Here are the basics:  

What is GMP?

GMP is Google’s unified advertising and analytics platform. It allows advertisers to plan, buy, measure, and optimize digital media in one place, and includes products like Search Ads 360, Display & Video 360, Campaign Manager 360, Analytics 360, and more.  

In addition to being a critical destination for media execution and management, the advertising activity in GMP creates vast datasets that can be mined for key insights around audiences, creative, targeting, and more.  

What is GCP?

GCP is Google’s suite of cloud computing services with advanced cloud infrastructure for data processing, storage, and analysis.  

For example, GCP’s BigQuery facilitates real-time querying of large datasets, providing users instant access to valuable information. Another GCP component, Dataflow, enables the creation of seamless data pipelines. Other platforms might have restrictions via API, but a key advantage of GCP is that it can ingest data from virtually anywhere, ensuring accuracy and consistency across diverse data sources.  

Additionally, GCP’s AI and ML capabilities, built into Vertex AI, BigQuery ML, and Duet AI, enable predictive modeling and can help identify key data patterns offloading the burden of establishing known models to vast datasets. The simplicity and efficiency gained by leveraging GCP’s capabilities provides an edge over your competitors who are continuing down the road of more traditional data science.

GMP + GCP: AN INTEGRATED APPROACH IS WHERE THE MAGIC HAPPENS

Independently, GMP and GCP are powerhouses of functionality and opportunity, but when used together they are transformative.  

GCP is highly flexible and can be integrated with GMP to add value specific to your organization’s unique goals and challenges; however, there are three practical ways the platforms work together to accelerate digital maturity and futureproof media performance for any marketer:  

Real-Time Campaign Optimization: GMP and GCP integration creates access to up-to-the-minute data insights, a critical advantage in today's rapidly evolving media landscape where real-time data is key.  

By integrating GMP and GCP, marketers can more swiftly adapt to emerging trends and insights, optimize ad spend, and tailor campaigns for different audience segments. This ensures timely and relevant communication and creates a competitive edge.  

For example, DV360 conversion data and GA4 web behavior data can all be ingested by BigQuery for rapid modeling or analysis and then sent back to DV360 for real-time campaign adjustments and optimizations. With this in place, marketers can understand and quickly adapt to not only customers’ conversion journey, but also their onsite behavior. This capability helps advance digital maturity while also building an increased customer understanding that can be used for optimization as well as other media and marketing use cases.  

Increased 1PD Value & Futureproofed Media Activation: An integrated approach to GMP and GCP positions marketers for success in a post-cookie world by scaling the impact of 1PD. By uniting 1PD (from GMP and elsewhere) in GCP, advertisers can combine and analyze their information in new and advanced ways to uncover opportunities for sophisticated and futureproofed media activation. Marketers can gain greater data accuracy and reliability, including more robust customer insights and more features and dimensions from which to target.  

For example, GCP allows a space where you can easily combine 1P datasets that can then have data science modeling techniques applied to them to create top performing audiences by identifying behaviors that signify an intent to convert or a likelihood to have a high impact to your business. When fueled by customer identifiers that are matched in a privacy-safe environment you are then able to target the right people with the right message at the right time. This is the sweet spot of GCP and GMP integration.

In addition to preparing for cookie deprecation, this helps marketers deliver enhanced customer experiences that ultimately drive greater engagement and performance.  

AI-Powered Personalization & Performance: An integrated approach to GMP and GCP can tap into the platforms’ built-in AI to create highly personalized and dynamic media strategies. Leveraging GCP’s Vertex AI or BQ ML in combination with GMP-generated data, marketers can activate data driven creative strategies that maximize outcomes.

For example, depending on available data signals, various tools from each platform can be used in concert to help dynamically adjust creative and drive performance gains in DV360. Data could be housed in BigQuery where additional GCP components, like Google Compute Engine, can run sophisticated data science processes and analyses that provide a data driven output distributed to Google Looker Studio for visualization as well as to CM360 and DV360 for activation.  

This is a practical application of AI, but also helps advance digital maturity more holistically by enabling data driven decision-making, real-time analytics, demand forecasting, content optimization, and more.  

IN SUMMARY

Harnessing the power of real-time optimization, 1PD, and AI are just a few ways that integrating GMP and GCP advances digital maturity and future-proofs marketing performance. But to extract maximum value from GMP and GCP, marketers should let their bespoke needs inform their approach to integration, focusing on the areas that drive the greatest impact for their specific business. At the end of the day, GCP is highly flexible and customizable. There are infinite ways to use the platform to solve media and marketing challenges of all shapes and sizes, but the best outcome will result from GMP and GCP integration that is tailored to your digital maturity journey.  

Sources:

1: https://www.bcg.com/publications/2021/the-fast-track-to-digital-marketing-maturity

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