Google recently unveiled a new version of Google Analytics – Google Analytics Premium, a paid version of its popular analytics suite developed with the enterprise in mind.
As your online business grows, you need more insight into your data to make decisions. Google Analytics premium edition brings the full, unfiltered power of analytics, coupled with enhanced analytics features which rival the existing free version.
Exponential data
The current version of Google Analytics has the limitation that it collects 50k unique rows of data per day. After that, data will is accumulated but under a separate bucket called “others.” Some of our clients use profiles and filters to work around this limit – filtering high traffic pages in separate profile and applying filters to truncate URL variables, for example – But it’s not a clean way to solve this problem. With Google Analytics Premium edition this limit is increased up to 1 million rows of data per day; more than enough for most enterprise-class organizations.
The number of page views in the free version is limited to 10 million hits per month. Though we’ve found ways to alter this limit by activating a Google Adwords account and connecting it with GAS account, the premium edition dispenses with the need for this workaround by allowing 1 billion hits per month. The free version also has a limit of five custom variables; the premium version allows for 50.
Extra processing power
With GA premium, data will be processed same day which ensures data freshness. Right now, the free version of GA generates sample reporting for large volume of data but with the premium version we have the facility to access significantly larger data volumes directly from GA, not from sampled data.
Advance analysis
A few months back, Google introduced multi-channel funnels to measure all digital marketing channels to better understand how different media work together to drive conversion. With GA Premium, Google added multi-channel attribution to see which digital media channels were touched to get the final sale.
For example, if you have a visitor who comes from Facebook, comes back through PPC, then through email before converting, which medium should the conversion be attributed to? With GA premium you can see each touch point for this conversion and shape your attribution model to give credit to the medium and campaign that deserves it.
Service and support
Phone and email support is available from experts to guide customized installation and reporting along with dedicated account managers.
Guarantees
Google Analytics Premium edition doesn’t have a lot more features in comparison to the free version, it does boast more robust guarantees and Service Level Agreements:
- Data Collection: 99.9% of data collected
- Reporting: 99% report availability
- Fresh Data: within 4 hours, 98% of the time
Google Analytics has been an extremely reliable tool for years with high level performance. However, many organizations’s legal teams require web analytics tools which provides more concrete guarantee of an SLA. Google has addressed all these concerns in launching this new version of Analytics.
Google Analytics Premium Pricing
For all its advance features, reporting and incredible support it will cost around $150,000 per year, billed monthly. This flat price is affordable in comparison to other web analytics tools in market.
Who should shift to GA Premium?
You should consider upgrading to GA Premium if you are:
- Using a paid tool you can take advantage of GA premium fixed price rather than paying per page view
- Looking for data guarantee and privacy
- Getting more than 10 million pages viewed per month
- Want to track more than 50 k unique rows per day
- Require advanced multi-channel digital marketing analysis
- Using advance tracking and need more than 5 custom variables
