Two versions of Google Analytics are available-the free version and Google Analytics Premium (the paid-for version). Which one is right for you? First off, let's get price out of the way. The standard free product is of course free to use, though you need to allow a budget for building a data strategy, implementation, and performing insights analysis. On the other hand, Google Analytics Premium is an annual contract, billable monthly, at a fixed cost of $150,000 per year.
Is that good value for money? For those websites with very high traffic volumes, Premium can represent great value for money when competitive tools bill by volume.With some other tools, the more data you have, the more you pay. Premium's price is fixed up to one billion data hits per month (approximately 100 million visitors per month). In addition, for budget planners a fixed-fee pricing model is advantageous for when your traffic can vary significantly, for example, by season: you know exactly what your analytics bill for the coming year will be.
For websites with modest volume, spending $150,000 a year on data collection and reporting can look like a big expense. Therefore, the tool needs to be clearly justified within the organization.
In the middle are websites that have the necessary budget but need guidance on selecting the right tool for the job.
All users want to make an informed decision as to which is the right tool for their organization. No one wants to spend $150,000 a year on a product they could have gotten for free. Likewise, no one wishes to advocate a free product and risk not being taken seriously by colleagues due to underestimating the significance of the task it is required for.
THE VALUE PROPOSITION OF PREMIUM
From an analyst's point of view, the free and Premium products appear almost identical. In fact, if you were to log in to the user interface of each product, you would be hard pressed to tell the difference-either visually or by features. So why is there such a gulf in price? To answer that, consider the four cornerstones of the Premium value proposition, as shown in Figure 2.1: the contract, horsepower, features, and service.
The value proposition of Premium is not just about gaining access to extra features. Rather, Premium is tailored to the needs of the enterprise as a whole. For example, all users love the idea of free-to-use products. However, at the enterprise level, procurement departments have a hard time dealing with free. That's because many enterprises require clear answers to questions such as Who is responsible for this service? Who has access to it? What if it stops working? Who owns the data? Who is our account representative? These answers need to be formalized into a legally binding document before the product can be adopted as an official business tool within the organization. That formalization process isn't available with a free product. If this describes your organization, then Google Analytics Premium is the right product for you.
The Contract
Having a formal contract in place solidifies responsibilities and provides a direct point of contact for ensuring the service is running. And that means having an SLA in place. For Premium users, Google's standard SLA provides the following guarantees. These percentages are based on a calendar month:
- 99.9% guaranteed uptime for data collection
- 99.0% guaranteed availability of the user interface and reporting
- Data freshness guaranteed to be within 4 hours
(Data freshness means that the data in your reports is never more than 4 hours old.) If any of these levels is not maintained, you receive a credit against your next invoice.
As you would expect, Google provides no service-level guarantees for the free product. As any Google user knows, the reliability of Google products is extremely high and rarely an issue. In fact, I am only aware of two periods of unexpected Google Analytics outages that lasted more than a few hours since 2005. (Google is pretty good at running its networks!) That said, data freshness for the free product is delayed by the volume of data you have. Often freshness is within 4 hours, though it may be delayed by as much as 48 hours.
Horsepower
By horsepower, I am referring to the software capabilities with respect to its data processing and storage. Premium has more of this available. Having more horsepower means Premium can
- Process larger amounts of data and store it for longer than the free service.
- Maintain report freshness regardless of volume.
- Avoid report sampling.
Data Volume
Data volume only becomes an issue you need to consider if you have more than 10 million data hits per month. This is the limit set in the terms of service of the free product. That's quite a lot of data-approximately equivalent to 1 million visits to your website per month. However, popular B2C sites can have a great deal more than this. If that describes you, then you need the Premium product-or you will need to restrict the data hits you collect (see the sidebar "What Is a Data Hit?").
For Premium users, 1 billion data hits per month are included with your fixed fee. You can also purchase more-up to 20 billion data hits per month (data volumes can get very large for popular high-traffic websites). Note that the Premium limit is applied on the business entity-the Premium customer-not for each of your websites. If you have, for example, three web properties each receiving 100 million visits per month, one Premium account will cover your needs. That is, you do not require three accounts.
What Is a Data Hit?
From Google's perspective, a data hit is the data sent by each user interaction on your website. The only user interaction Google Analytics collects by default is the visitor's pageview. If you receive 1 million visits to your website each month and on average each visitor views 4 pages, Google Analytics will collect 4 million data hits.
Other common data hit types include events, transactions, and social interactions. If a visitor viewed 8 pages on your site (8 pageviews), downloaded a PDF brochure (1 event), made a purchase (1 transaction of 2 items), and then clicked on your Facebook "Like" button, that would be a total of 13 data hits.
When estimating data requirements, I allow for 10 data hits per visitor. In other words, 1 million visitors per month will generate approximately 10 million data hits.
Restricting Your Data Hits
You are required to restrict your data hits if you are regularly exceeding the 10 million data hit limit of the free Google Analytics product. If, for example, your website receives 50 million data hits per month, you need to restrict your data collection at 20% in order to remain within the terms of service for the free product.
Restricting your data collection can be a strategic decision (you simply do not collect parts of the visitor journey in the first place, such as not tracking visits to your blog area), or a setting you make within your tracking code on your pages to randomly exclude visitor sessions in your tracking. The latter is preferable as it is statistically safer.
Report Freshness
Report freshness becomes slower the larger the volume of data Google Analytics has to process. However, Premium guarantees this will never go above 4 hours. If you are using Google Analytics for free and have small to medium website traffic, you will see a similar time for freshness. However, the delay will increase with data volume. If your website receives over 1 million data hits in a single day, your reports will only be refreshed once for that day in the free version. That is, you will have no intraday processing.
Report Sampling
Most Google Analytics reports are not sampled (free or Premium version). However, as you drill down into your data, the data associations become more complex. As with all software products, as complexity grows the performance deteriorates. To avoid this impact on the service, Google Analytics introduces sampling limits.
For the free version, sampling kicks in when the number of visitor sessions in the analysis pot exceeds 500,000. Typically you will see this if you have a large volume of traffic or you are viewing data over a long date range, such as year-on-year comparisons.
For Premium, the sampling limit is 20 times higher, at 10 million sessions, though this value is continually being revised upward. Reports can also be downloaded unsampled up to a limit of 100 million sessions.
Sampling Explained
By sampling visitor sessions at random, Google Analytics reduces its processing load. For example, if the analysis pot you are investigating includes 2 million sessions, the free Google Analytics will sample 1 in 4 of those sessions at random to bring the pot size down within its limit. After processing the sample, Google Analytics scales the results back up by multiplying by 4. This is a standard statistical method when dealing with large volumes of data. A smaller representative subset of data is used to estimate the total values.
Although the scaled numbers are statistically accurate, problems occur if you further analyze the sampled report, such as when you drill down within your sampled data to examine conversion rates or revenue numbers. As these are an even smaller subset of the sampled data,...
