• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 27, 2018

After 18 years of building a suite of iconic advertising brands, Google has rebranded its ad and platform products to evolve with changes across the industry. On Wednesday, Google AdWords becomes Google Ads, and DoubleClick and Google Analytics 360 combined to become the Google Marketing platform under one brand.

The announcement, made Wednesday, includes plans to sunset the DoubleClick brand and combine the analytics and buying tools. DoubleClick Ad Exchange and DoubleClick for Publishers will become one brand, called Google Ad Manager.

Dan Taylor, managing director of Global Display and programmatic at Google, said it was time to streamline and evolve the brand to better reflect all the different ways to connect advertisers to consumers such as search, shopping, video, display, local and more.

Advertisers getting the most from Google’s platforms tend to integrate analytics, so Google decided to align with an up-and-coming user behavior by investing in Google Analytics 360 and create a closer integration between analytics and buying. “We didn’t historically make that very easy to do within our products, so we wanted to bring that together in one offering,” Taylor said.

In the Google Marketing Platform, advertisers will find a new hub and dashboard for search ads, display and video 360, or any of the analytics offerings from Analytics 360 or Optimize.

Advertisers were connecting the two products on their own. “It emerged as a best practices, so we decided to lead into that,” he said.

For instance, advertisers using DoubleClick Bid Manager wanted to connect Analytics, but it wasn’t a simple process. “You had to go into a separate UI and login and make the change on both sides,” he said.

Early tests prove a higher rate of returns. Google pointed to two early users -- Adidas and Sprint. Adidas, for example, bought its brand and measurement teams together on Google Marketing Platform to better collaborate and share insights, and discovered that the platform drove a better view of the full customer journey and improved results, from brand lift to website traffic to sales.

Sprint brought together its ads and analytics teams and tools and was able to get deeper insights about how to reduce churn -- a top priority for their subscription-based business, and successfully reduced it 10%.

And while Google is evolving the brand, it’s not at the exclusion of interoperability with other third-party tools. There are about 100 integrations with measurement providers and sources of inventory.

As part of Google Marketing Platform, Google announced Display & Video 360, which combines features from DoubleClick Bid Manager, Campaign Manager, Studio and Audience Center to allow creative, agency, and media teams to collaborate and execute complete ad campaigns in one place.

For small businesses, Google introduced a new campaign type called Smart Campaign in Google Ads that is intended to make it easier to get started with online advertising to drive store visits, calls and transactions. It brings machine-learning technology in Google Ads to small businesses and helps them get quick results on search or display.

Last year Google announced AdWords Express, a way for smaller businesses to get online. The company also rebuild AdWords on a new technology stack. Smart Campaigns becomes the main way for users to log into Google Ads.