Google Analytics Premium
Mindshare, October 2011
Background Recently Google officially released the ‘premium’ version of its popular web analytics platform – Google Analytics (GA) Premium. A sizable number of web owners and advertisers use Google Analytics to track their web site performances and have struggled to use its full potential due to limitations that exists in the GA free version and the GA version which gives added benefit if you are an AdWords advertiser. Will Google be able to get their ‘FREE’ or ‘STANDARD’ version users pay for a premium GA account? Let’s find out.
Details“Google Analytics is the second most popular web analytics program used by Internet Retailer Top 500-ranked e-retailers, with 161 e-retailers using it. The top provider of paid web analytics programs to the Top 500 is Adobe Omniture, with 217 Top 500 retailer clients; IBM Coremetrics is third with 103.” (Internet Retailer.com). We can quite comfortably say that Google Analytics is the de-facto web analytics platform for most of the advertisers across the globe, with an exception of sites which are owned and managed by a central Global team sitting outside of the region.
More and more advertisers have expressed interest in opting for ‘Google Analytics’ as their preferred web analytics platform in 2012 (based on internal Mindshare Report, Singapore) – given its ease of use deployment and it is FREE.
Implications Following will be some key implications for advertisers and industry as a whole:
1. Omniture, WebTrends, and CoreMetrics are going to face stiff competition from a fast emerging platform – Google Analytics.
2. Large advertisers, who struggled with Google ‘Sample’ data collection, can now take full advantage of RAW data that is available with Google Premium.
3. Smaller & medium sizes businesses are likely to be happy with the 10m hits cap that Google Analytics Standard version offers.
Who needs Google Analytics Premium?
1. If your site generates 1 billion hits per month (GA tracks 10 million hits a month for standard accounts).
2. If you want to progress from sampled data and get your hands dirty with the raw data dumps.
3. If you want to use few of the 50 custom variables to generate deeper insights into your web data.
SummaryIn all essence it will depends what role your website plays in your business. If you are a web company – you definitely want the best tool out there.
At USD 150,000 annual fee, GA Premium is no cheap platform to take on. For the moment we can stick to Google Analytics Standard for most regular websites, but as the number of hits on your site starts to cross 10m then it’s time to take stock of a serious web analytics tool.
For more details reach out to your Mindshare Web Analytics team.
Some Reading References:
1. Web Analytics review :
http://web-analytics-review.toptenreviews.com/ 2. Web Analytics usage :
http://catbirdanalytics.wordpress.com/2011/02/06/web-analytics-usage-recent-data-on-tools-tagging/ 3. E-Commerce Web Analytics Market : http://istobe.com/blog/2010/01/25/e-commerce-web-analytics-market-share-january-2010/