Premium Google Analytics

Google has launched a paid version of Google Analytics. For a fixed cost ($150,000 a year in the US), it will offer 24/7 customer support, robust data processing and service guarantees.

What is new in the paid version?

The general feature set and user experience remain the same as the standard product.
The new Google Analytics premium is not about features, there are few capabilities available on the premium version that are not available on the standard version.

Who is it for?

The new version audience is mainly enterprises that receive a high amount of traffic and need a certain commitment from Google’s part on data collection, up-time, and support. It is also critical for sites who want to process data more frequently and without sampling.

Google Analytics Premium – Fact Sheet

Processing Power

• Guaranteed processing for up to 1 billion hits per month (vs. the 10 million a month for standard accounts).

• Faster, intra-day processing

• Service Level Agreement around data collection, reporting, and processing

• 99.9% on Collection up-time

• 98% on on-time Data Freshness (within 4 hours)

Advanced Analysis Tools

• Up to 50 Custom Variable slots (vs. the standard version that provides 5)

• Unsampled report downloads for custom report requests

• Unaggregated report downloads for large report requests (up to 1 million rows per download)

Dedicated Support

• Custom training and support

• 24/7 emergency support line

Our Thoughts

GA Premium’s flat annual fee is less than many large scale users currently spend on web analytics. The unsampled reports and the SLA are great differentials (which were always used by Google’s competitors on the field).

Google Analytics is by far the most used tool, and this can only count in favor when an enterprise is choosing a tool. Another advantage is, should you lose your web analytics budget, you can downgrade to the standard Google Analytics without losing your data or needing to switch tags (and can upgrade again later). We would definitely recommend it for our enterprise level clients.

On a side note, Google continues to enhance the features on its free version as well. For example, it introduced "multichannel attribution" earlier this month, and rolled out "real time reporting" just yesterday.