Google Analytics Premium is Here
29th September 2011 Posted in Analytics
Today Google launched their Premium Web Analysis offering to the enterprise market. At current pricing it weighs in at the heavyweight end of the market. Let's hope it's good at what it does then.........
We have been sitting on news of Google Analytics Premium for over a year now when Google first announced it's development at their partner conference in Mountain View. This year's conference saw the final draft presented to the global partner network. We only needed to keep quiet for 15 days this time. Now that it is here, we thought it only fair that we join and help spread the word.
What does one get for one's money?
The principle behind GA Premium is that there are some features and capabilities that are more attractive to enterprise level users. For example bigger data limits, faster data processing and measurement of marketing and channels that only tend to be used by bigger organisations.
The full list of distinctions between Premium and free are below:
Processing Power
- Guaranteed processing for up to 1 billion hits per month
- Faster, intra-day processing for up to 1 billion hits per month
- Service Level Agreement around data collection, reporting, and processing
- 99.9% on Collection up-time
- 99% on Reporting up-time
- 98% on on-time Data Freshness (within 4 hours)
Advanced Analysis Tools
- Up to 50 Custom Variable slots
- Unsampled report downloads for custom report requests
- Unaggregated report downloads for large report requests (up to 1 million rows per download)
- Premium-only features, such as the Attribution Modelling tool for Multi-Channel Funnels
Dedicated Support
- Dedicated Account Management
- Phone & Email support 10 hours per day, 5 days per week
- Implementation Consultation & Tagging Audit
- Live & Webinar Training
- 24/7 Product Emergency Escalation Support, if the product is ever outside of the SLA
Does this mean no more free GA?
No. Ultimately this plaftorm will only apply to a small percentage of the total GA user-base.
Are Google going to reduce the features of free GA?
Also, no. We've seen the roadmap for the both GAFree (I just made that up) and GAPre (that too) and they are both impressive. We are not watching an attempt to strip features for free users. GAFree is also only getting better in the months to come.
Here is a quote direct from Google on the topic:
"We are more committed than ever to our standard version. With the release of GAv5 we are poised to release features faster than ever and are confident that measurement can keep up with the digital consumer journey at last. In the last 3 months alone we've released many great features to the new version of Google Analytics."
They agree with me.
Who will use it?
Time will tell. Our immediate thoughts are that organisations fitting all or some of the below criteria should give it some serious thought:
- Currently hitting data limits in GA
- Experiencing slow report loading in GA
- Frequently suffering from data sampling in reports
- Require very fresh data for immediate campaign decision making
- Have the ability to scale the cost across multiple sites (Hello big FMCGs)
- Are looking to move from another 'enterprise solution' . If this is the case see my point below
- Like the features and interface but lack the SLA to keep your legal/policy/IT department happy
- Need to apply more than 5 custom variables to your account
Why would you use GA Premium over another enterprise solution?
That's a big old blog post right there. Ultimately there are many reasons for and against depending on your individual requirements. From a universal point of view I think these top 3 reasons are compelling:
- It still has the slickest interface. Every effort GA make is in making the product as usable as possible
- It's on half of the internet, as ranked by traffic volume. As it has become the default solution, hiring a web analyst with GA experience is easy peasy.
- Depending on your market, Google will own a big chunk of your overall traffic aquistion sources. They tend to do a good job integrating features surrounding these into GA. AdWords, Organic traffic, Youtube, Google shopping, Google+ etc (some more integration with these to come?). Other platforms can't give you this integration.
Direct from Google
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