Google Analytics 360 vs. Standard pt. 1

The other day, I posted a short video on the Top 3 reasons organizations choose to invest in Google Analytics 360 instead of just sticking with the free version, Google Analytics Standard.

Here, I'm going into a bit more detail and I broke out each reason into its own post. This is Part 1. Stay tuned for the other two next week.

Reason #1 - Hit Threshold

Google Analytics Standard has a threshold of 10,000,000 (10 million) hits per month. You can go over that, but once you do, Google may contact you to warn you that you need to pay for 360 or they will cut off your analytics completely. Google Analytics 360 gives you 500,000,000 (500 million) hits per month at the initial level, and it can go as high as 20,000,000,000 (20 billion).

This is the definition of a Hit according to the Google Analytics 360 Terms.

“Hit" means the base unit of measurement that is sent to the Google Analytics 360 service for processing, which may include but is not limited to a page view, a transaction or a call to the Google Analytics system by an OSCI or various libraries, including, Javascript (ga.js, urchin.js), Silverlight, Flash, and Mobile. A Hit may currently be a page view, a transaction, item, or event. Hits may also be delivered to the Google Analytics system without using one of the various libraries by other Google Analytics-supported protocols and mechanisms the Service makes available to You."

In order to check how many hits you have, login to Google Analytics, go to the Admin gear icon in the lower left, and select Property Settings in the middle column. You'll see Last day, Last 7 Days, and Last 30 Days of hits.

Unfortunately, you can only do this at the Property level, so you may need to add up the hits on your main Properties because Google is going count all your Properties towards the total hit count.