CM360 Architecture: How to Build a Strong Foundation for CM360 Reporting

What to Consider Before Building Your First Campaign Manager 360 Advertiser

While advertiser creation is essentially the first step in getting started with Campaign Manager 360 (CM360), it’s often one of the most important and frequently overlooked. The decisions made here can define the way you or your client’s data is stored and organized for years to come. Making these choices isn’t easy, as there are a high number of factors to examine, and they’re not always objective or pointing in the same direction. The most important considerations tend to focus on business structure and desired data-sharing capabilities, so to help you consider your most efficient reporting setup, we’ve outlined some key questions for you to consider below.

BUSINESS STRUCTURE: DO YOUR BUSINESS ATTRIBUTES POINT TOWARDS ONE OR MULTIPLE ADVERTISERS?

To determine if your business attributes point to one or multiple advertisers, consider the following attributes:

Business Type

Sometimes advertiser separation is obvious, like when agencies give each client their own advertiser, but defining the architecture doesn’t always end here. Individual clients or direct marketers are often further divided into multiple advertisers when company size or scope increases. 

Business Units/Brands

When businesses grow to a certain point, they may increase their reach by developing sub-brands, or vice versa, like when Facebook announced Meta. When trying to determine which CM360 architecture is right for any business structure, review the following: 

• Budget/Sales - How are advertising budget and revenue managed? Many brands operate off of unique budgets and look at performance for each brand individually, even if some of the same users may be interacting with more than one.
• Region - Often used as a guideline for how the budget is divided, brands will sometimes create separate advertisers for their marketing efforts based on regions of the world.
• Language - Going beyond regions, language can be a key factor in a brand’s choice to use separate advertisers.
• Creatives - Sometimes different creatives determine advertiser splits even for domestic sub-brands. 
• Domain - A different domain may justify a separate advertiser, but it’s less likely with sub-domains.

SHARING DATA: HOW DO YOUR BUSINESS ATTRIBUTES AFFECT THE WAY YOU WANT YOUR DATA TO FLOW?

As you probably noticed in the previous section, none of the various characteristics that were mentioned are enough to determine your CM360 architecture alone. Business structure is only going to point you in the right direction. What usually determines a CM360 Architecture plan is your desire for sharing data across advertisers. After you have a rough idea of your advertiser split, it’s time to start thinking about advertiser relationships. Here are some things to consider:

Conversions

CM360’s robust Reporting and Attribution section is most powerful when advertisers are utilizing CM360 Floodlight activities (tags) to measure conversion actions and other important KPIs. A Floodlight configuration is the collection of Floodlight settings and Floodlight activities assigned to a particular advertiser. Multiple advertisers can share the same Floodlight configuration, but only if a parent-child relationship has been established. In this situation, the parent advertiser controls the Floodlight configuration, but both the parent and children advertisers can utilize it in reporting. This way, only one Floodlight activity needs to be installed for each action to capture conversion information for all of the advertisers involved. It’s important to note, however, that only the advertiser who received the most recent click would be credited the conversion. Deduplication of conversions is the most common reason why either parent-child relationships are created or advertisers aren’t split apart after all.

Audiences

Unlike Floodlight configurations, sharing audiences does not change the way data is organized. However, audiences are built from Floodlight data, so if you’re going to use a parent-child relationship, you would have to decide that well before you can share audience data.

Other GMP Products

In addition to sharing audience lists, you can determine cross-channel potential and desire by taking a broader look at current or potential multi-product architecture, sharing limitations and required linkages. For example, a CM360 advertiser’s audience(s) can only be shared with a Display & Video 360 (DV360) advertiser if the two advertisers are linked across platforms (sharing a Floodlight configuration), or if the CM360 Advertiser shared its audiences with another CM360 advertiser that’s linked to the DV360 advertiser in question.

Reporting Considerations

Conversion deduplication is part of what makes Floodlight tag utilization and remarketing across the entire Google Marketing Platform tech stack so compelling. You can ensure you’re not overcounting or undercounting conversions, understand each advertiser’s most effective assets and unlock the full potential of your data. 

What to Consider After You’ve Built Your CM360 Foundation

Now, some of you may be thinking this is great… but I already created my Advertisers. Or maybe you even took a lot of these considerations to heart but still ended up short of the CM360 architecture of your dreams. The good news is that CM360 also provides ways to organize your reporting data once those advertisers have been created, just in case you don’t feel like starting over. Depending on which dimensions and metrics you hope to view, as well as your existing CM360 architecture and the other reporting groups you’ve defined, you can potentially filter your reports in ways that change how conversions are attributed. Here are some CM360 reporting-specific fields to keep in mind:

Advertiser Groups

If you didn’t create a parent-child relationship to de-duplicate conversions but still want to report on multiple Advertisers together, you can add advertisers to an advertiser group and manipulate your reports as necessary. Just know that it is likely conversions are being double-counted if the same conversion action is tagged separately for each advertiser.

Floodlight Activity Groups

Are your advertisers sharing a Floodlight configuration but some Floodlight activities are specific to each advertiser? Put them in Floodlight activity groups to easily separate conversion data. Just be careful, because once you create a Floodlight activity,  you can’t change its activity group. You’d have to remove the activity from the group and then recreate it in a new group.

Creative Groups

Lastly, Creative Groups are a great way to divide up creatives for reporting purposes within the same advertiser. Since creatives exist at the Advertiser level, advertisers that run creatives for different sub-brands, in different languages, or with different content (among other things) can better analyze the performance of their different creative tactics.

CM360 Architecture: Moving Forward

Numerous factors help businesses decide how to design their CM360 architecture, these suggestions are by no means exhaustive. Characteristics about your business can point you in the right direction, but the decision-making process typically hinges on data sharing and reporting needs. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. You really just need to start by asking yourself if the reporting is doing what you want or if it can be designed a better way.

Beyond standard reporting capabilities, advertisers are always thinking about the look and flexibility of their reports. This almost always brings the conversation to the intricate topic of naming conventions, which is a different CM360 architecture conversation for another time. Stay tuned for a future post!