Google is rolling out a new premium version of Google Analytics that comes with a hefty price tag. Is it worth the cost?
Google, Inc. recently announced the launch of a new premium version of Google Analytics. Unlike the standard version, it carries a hefty annual fee.
Web-based transactions represent a larger portion of a company’s lead generation, revenues and profits, so having more robust tools to measure the performance of websites is critical for business success. But does your business need to spend six figures to accomplish that? Let’s take a closer look.
According to the Web Analytics Association, Web analytics is the “measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing Web usage.”
Through Web analytics, companies and organizations can track how certain changes–and combinations of changes–help or hinder the goals of a Website. On successful Websites, hundreds or even thousands of combinations of words, images, navigation and other variables are tested to determine which combination produces the best results.
While Web analytics may sound simple, it is extremely complex and requires sophisticated software to measure, collect, analyze and report Website performance.
How does Google Analytics fit in?
Google Analytics is the leading software package for executing Web analytics. By adding a small snippet of code to your Website pages–manually or automatically–Google Analytics collects and measures data on how visitors arrive at your Website. It also logs what they do during their visits and how they leave.
As this data is processed, Google Analytics populates an intuitive user interface with the results. These online reports provide the analysis that allows you to make business decisions regarding your website.
According to a recent study by Metric Mail using data from Alexa, nearly half of the top 1 million Websites use Google Analytics. Research by BuiltWith confirms that more than 14.6 million Websites currently use Google Analytics, including 61 percent of the top 10,000 websites on the Internet.
Google Analytics has such a deep market penetration for two reasons: It’s good and it’s free.
What are the key benefits of the premium version?
The premium version takes Web analytics to an entirely different level. A license costs $150,000 a year. For this fee, Google offers these advantages to its free version.
- Information control – Google signs a contract with your company explicitly stating that you own your data and have control over its dissemination. The current non-premium version has no such guarantees.
- Guaranteed performance – Google signs a service level agreement (SLA) guaranteeing 99.9 percent data collection uptime, a maximum data processing time of four hours and 99 percent reporting uptime.
