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Google Campaign Manager 360

Score9 out of 10

175 Reviews and Ratings

What is Google Campaign Manager 360?

Replacing DoubleClick, Google Campaign Manager 360 is a web-based ad management system for advertisers and agencies, used to manage digital campaigns across websites and mobile. This includes features for ad serving, targeting, verification, and reporting.

Top Performing Features

  • Ad deployment

    Allows users to quickly and easily deploy new ad campaigns from within the tool.

    Category average: 8.2

  • Display advertising

    Supports banner and rich media display ads, including video, audio, mobile, etc.

    Category average: 7

  • Ad dashboards

    Dashboards for analyzing and/or optimizing ads are clean, easy to use, and easy to understand.

    Category average: 6.1

Areas for Improvement

  • Ad forecasting and optimization

    Ad forecasting models predict campaign performance to assist with optimization.

    Category average: 6.5

  • Ad campaign creation

    Allows users to programmatically create ads and build new campaigns within the tool.

    Category average: 6.6

  • Sequence targeting

    Allows users to create ad sequences that have several stages covering different topics or products; individual viewers are shown ads in a particular order across websites. This provides very fine control over brand messaging and storytelling.

    Category average: 6.2

Google Marketing Platform help us to leverage valuable business insights

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Google Marketing Platform for media analysis and optimisation. Understanding our online data is key to improve the way we drive decisions regarding investment allocation between all our media platforms. Thanks to Google Marketing Platform powerful tools we are able to make data accessible for media and digital stakeholders and help them improving ROAS. One of our use case is about matching our online data (collected in Google Analytics) and our offline data (collected backend) in order to understand the best digital paths that lead to a business conversion (which always occur offline). Through Google Cloud Platform, BigQuery and Looker Studio especially we are then able to simplify the way our online/offline tables can be used troughout the organization by digital stakeholders.

Pros

  • Data accessibility
  • Data visualization

Cons

  • Connectors in third party platforms (eg Power BI)
  • Formation for beginners

Alternatives Considered

Google Analytics

Other Software Used

Hotjar, Contentsquare

I only really use a couple features in GMP

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use several Google products within our organization that [is] part of the Google Marketing Platform -- specifically, Google Analytics, Data Studio, Tag Manager, Campaign Manager. We had been using these products individually to run ads, manage site tags, and check website traffic performance. We are also heavy utilizers of Google Data Studio (in combination with Improvado and Google Big Query) to provide live performance dashboards to our clients that show performance from Google and non-Google platforms.

Pros

  • Acts as a hub to access all your most common Google Products.
  • Tag Manager in particular simplifies website tag implementation and centralizes the information.
  • Allows for better data sharing/connectivity between your Google products (ex: Search ads and Google Analytics).

Cons

  • I find the Campaign Manager menu + UI to [be] very inconvenient to use. You end up opening several windows just to access different information from the same platform. They break up Campaign Manager 360 into Trafficking, Planning, and Reporting & Attribution. I would prefer if these 3 sections were more seamlessly integrated together. They almost act as separate UIs.

Return on Investment

  • The conversion tracking is the major strength of GMP. I like the flexibility with attribution modeling.
  • When it comes to [spending] an impression delivery for display campaigns set up through GMP, we basically avoid any data created from the platform. Most of the Display work we do involves flat-rate contracts that are not accurately represented through GMP's reporting. When we integrate GMP data into our reporting, we only use it for Conversion reporting and pull all other performance from our DSP UI.

DoubleClick does the Trick

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I regularly set up, manage, and report on digital ad campaigns in GMP. We work closely with an ad agency that builds creative assets & purchases media spots on various display networks, then I traffick those ads and deliver tags to be implemented. The main problem we are trying to address is building our company’s brand awareness, which is happening through a combination of native display advertising and targeted remarketing campaigns.

Pros

  • Bulk editing capabilities
  • Easy integration with APIs
  • User friendly & intuitive UI
  • Comprehensive reporting

Cons

  • Archiving campaigns can be a tedious process
  • An email alert when placements become inactive would be useful
  • Being able to search for specific URLs/query strings in the campaign search bar would be nice

Return on Investment

  • Studies showed that it helped increase our brand awareness year over year
  • Helped us target and convert consumers who left our site

Alternatives Considered

Google Ad Manager, Google Analytics and Google Data Studio

Fantastic ad manager for advertisers

Pros

  • Preview links are very helpful and easy to generate for previewing single or groups of media. You can even preview them inside of websites so get a better understand of how the ad interacts with the rest of the content around it.
  • It also allows you not only to track display media but search as well. Being a Google company consolidates both display and search invoices for clients together which makes it easier for billing purposes.
  • Able to exclude poor performing sites.

Cons

  • Some of the bid strategies can be a bit confusing in regards to how they're working.
  • One issue I often run into with Google Marketing Platform can be the editing tool in management. This tool allows you to update a number of things from placement or creative name to the landing page the creative should drive to.

Return on Investment

  • We're able to quickly and systematically push ads out to our clients. We don't have to worry about getting specs for all the different ad servers. Having it all in one location saves a lot of time.
  • The reporting format and flexibility has without a doubt increases the overall workflow efficiency, enabling vendors to spend less time filling out forms and more time selling.

Alternatives Considered

Sizmek

WebCongress recommends Google Marketing Platform if you want to get the most out of your campaigns!

Pros

  • Get the best insights from our platforms.
  • Integrates all Google tools, data, and our websites.
  • Great optimization solutions and dashboards.

Cons

  • Some optimization features are missing that you can find at other tools.
  • Improve the integration with other platforms.
  • Analytics is a bit complex to navigate and some aspects are confusing.

Return on Investment

  • It's very positive ROI for us, since we use it to manage all our campaigns, data, and cross check information with other solutions.
  • It helps us optimize our campaigns and content.