Google Analytics Breakthrough

18 Analytics 360

Google is a unique company and does things in a unique and often revolutionary way. In 2005, when Google purchased a relatively unknown company called Urchin, rebranded the product to Google Analytics (GA), and offered it for free, what used to belong to the elite was made available to all. Fast-forward to today and millions of sites and apps—start-ups, the Fortune 500, and the entire spectrum of businesses and organizations—are running GA.

Following the wide adoption of the free tool, Google made a strategic decision to enter the enterprise Web and mobile analytics market and offer an enterprise edition of GA. Google Analytics Premium was thus born in 2011. In March 2016, the product was re-branded to Analytics 360, one of six integrated products of the Google Analytics 360 Suite.

Why Analytics 360?

Although GA Standard (the non-paid version of GA) is feature-rich and has powerful capabilities, it does, expectedly, have some limitations. For instance, according to the published GA’s Terms of Service, GA Standard is offered at no charge for up to 10 million hits per month per account, and “Google may change its fees and payment policies for the Service from time to time including the addition of costs for geographic data, the importing of cost data from search engines, or other fees charged to Google or its wholly owned subsidiaries by third-party vendors for the inclusion of data in the Service reports. The changes to the fees or payment policies are effective ...