Google moves into paid analytics with Premium product

Launched today, Google Analytics Premium is the company’s first paid analytics product. For a fixed cost ($150,000 a year in the US), it will offer 24/7 customer support, robust data processing and service guarantees.

 

Although Google remains tight lipped on precise numbers, the new product has been in pilot for the past year with a host of household name clients including Travelocity, Gucci, and Papa Johns.

 

Enrique Munoz Torres, senior product manager at Google, said: “Even though we’re very proud of our standard Google Analytics product, there are some important gaps, especially when it comes to enterprises. If something is broken, they want to be able to call someone. And even if something is not broken, and they want help with implementation and have any questions, they want to talk to a human and get answers right away.”

 

Although a global roll-out of Premium is planned, Google Analytics Premium is currently only available in the US and Canada and the UK. The product will be sold directly through Google or through authorised Google Analytics Premium resellers. In the UK, there are currently three - ConversionWorks , I Spy and ivantage.

 

Jim Brigden, CEO of I Spy Marketing said: “As an accredited reseller for GA Premium, I Spy Marketing has seen first-hand the amount of thought and effort that has been ploughed into creating a marketing leading tool,” comments “Crucially, GA Premium is going to be priced at a cheaper price point than the rest of its ‘top of the market’ competitors, and also has the added benefit of having no unexpected or unplanned pricing ‘extras’.

 

“As well as being less expensive than other similar feature set tools, GA Premium has the added benefit of inbuilt integration across both Adwords and Dart For Advertisers (DFA). Given the importance of Search in the online marketing mix and the resurgence of Display it makes sense for many marketers to select a tool that integrates seamlessly with Google Adwords management interface and the DFA platform,” Brigden added.

 

An overview of the product:

 

 

Torres said the success of Google’s free analytics product has been driven by a user-friendly interface that makes it possible for people across a company - not just the dedicated analytics team - to pull up data and run reports. This latest product builds on that model with the kind of staff support and data processing needed by big, data-driven companies.

 

Google Analytics is already the most used free web analytics tool on the market, according to industry analysts followed by a free product from Yahoo. Google Analytics Premium aims to take on players including Adobe’s Omniture, as well as Webtrends. Other major paid players include IMB’s Coremetrics and Comscore’s Digital Analytix.