What to do when your site is "too large" for Google Analytics?
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What to do when your site is "too large" for Google Analytics?
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Re: What to do when your site is "too large" for Google Analytics?
#2I got the exact same email today, and had to read their terms of service to know for sure I wasn't being had.
Apparently you need an adwords account 'in good standing', I'm not sure what they mean by that because we do have an adwords account, and as far as I know and can see it is in 'good standing', only we're not advertising any more using google because we found that it isn't making enough money in return.
See:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1593898
I'd pay for analytics, it's a very useful service and I can't see the adwords angle, after all with something as vague as 'good standing' as the deciding factor how about simply charging for analytics?
I always figured that analytics was free because it provides google with useful data as well.
Maybe it's time to get my old stats suite dusted off and re-installed, I don't like operating against the TOS even if it is apparently something they'll let you get away with.
Re: What to do when your site is "too large" for Google Analytics?
#3I got the exact same email today, and had to read their terms of service to know for sure I wasn't being had. Apparently you need an adwords account 'in good standing', I'm not sure what they mean by that because we do have an adwords account, and as far as I know and can see it is in 'good standing', only we're not advertising any more using google because we found that it isn't making enough money in return. See: h…
Good standing doesn't seem to be vague to me really. Your account isn't violating some ToS, delinquent, etc... Most accounts are probably in good standing.
I wouldn't worry about this too much. It doesn't cut you off, just limits it to updating once per day (basically just a day behind). Its possible that your business/company is dependent on information from hourly reporting in realtime, and if that's the case you should probably augment GA with some other paid service or roll your own BI internally.
Re: What to do when your site is "too large" for Google Analytics?
#4I got the exact same email today, and had to read their terms of service to know for sure I wasn't being had. Apparently you need an adwords account 'in good standing', I'm not sure what they mean by that because we do have an adwords account, and as far as I know and can see it is in 'good standing', only we're not advertising any more using google because we found that it isn't making enough money in return. See: h…
Good standing doesn't seem to be vague to me really. Your account isn't violating some ToS, delinquent, etc... Most accounts are probably in good standing. I wouldn't worry about this too much. It doesn't cut you off, just limits it to updating once per day (basically just a day behind). Its possible that your business/company is dependent on information from hourly reporting in realtime, and if that's the case you s…
I think it is a bit weird (and points to a fairly serious lack of 'Chinese walls') that google would change the behavior of their analytics package based on your account for a completely unrelated offering.
I see adwords, adsense and analytics (as well as search) as unrelated offerings by google.
Re: What to do when your site is "too large" for Google Analytics?
#5Professional Google-certified web analyst here.
According to the terms of use I'm familiar with, linking an AdWords account to your GA account, and spending money on it (even nominal sums like a buck fifty) has been sufficient to be exempt from any hit limits on GA. Your AdWords account does need to be explicitly linked to the GA account, and you do need to be spending some non-zero amount of money, but they're easy to connect and that's honestly still quite cheap for an analytics implementation. Omniture SiteCatalyst will run you in the six figures per year, minimum. It's possible that Google has changed its policy, as Google has a reputation for being somewhat fickle as an analytics provider, but I haven't heard anything via official channels.
That aside, only having your data update once a day should not be a problem. There is surprisingly little value in data updating multiple times per day. There's no reason to have data update more frequently than you can take action upon it, and most sites of most companies move at the speed of a glacier. There are a few business models where it is beneficial, for example news sites can benefit from knowing what stories are really popular right this minute. Besides, if you need data more often than once a day, you shouldn't be on Google Analytics anyways. Average data delay is a few hours, but it's not unheard of for data to be stale by a day or two.
Re: What to do when your site is "too large" for Google Analytics?
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good standing doesn't seem to be vague to me really. Your account isn't violating some ToS, delinquent, etc... Most accounts are probably in good standing. I wouldn't worry about this too much. It doesn't cut you off, just limits it to updating once per day (basically just a day behind). Its possible that your business/company is dependent on information from hourly reporting in realtime, and if that's the case you s…
I think it is a bit weird (and points to a fairly serious lack of 'Chinese walls') that google would change the behavior of their analytics package based on your account for a completely unrelated offering. I see adwords, adsense and analytics (as well as search) as unrelated offerings by google.
Analytics has always been tied to AdWords. There used to be a page-view-per-month hard cap that could be removed by linking to an active (spending $) AdWords account. AdWords integration is also pushed pretty heavily in the GA training material, and even in the certification exam. In the real world, there are quite a lot of people whose only experience with GA is optimizing CPC campaigns. Personally, I've never used it for that purpose, but Google pushes them as a bundle.
Re: What to do when your site is "too large" for Google Analytics?
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it is a bit weird (and points to a fairly serious lack of 'Chinese walls') that google would change the behavior of their analytics package based on your account for a completely unrelated offering. I see adwords, adsense and analytics (as well as search) as unrelated offerings by google.
Analytics has always been tied to AdWords. There used to be a page-view-per-month hard cap that could be removed by linking to an active (spending $) AdWords account. AdWords integration is also pushed pretty heavily in the GA training material, and even in the certification exam. In the real world, there are quite a lot of people whose only experience with GA is optimizing CPC campaigns. Personally, I've never used…
Funny, I've been using analytics, adwords and adsense for years (adwords not so much for the last two years or so) and I never clued in to that.
I wonder if I'm alone in that perception or if this is more common.
Re: What to do when your site is "too large" for Google Analytics?
#8I've run into problems with hitting a number of limits on Analytics as well and still have no good solution.
A couple of solutions I'm aware of:
1) Omniture Site Catalyst: A lot of big sites use this but it will cost you dearly. My site runs about 85mm pvs/month and they quoted me close to a million dollars a year at those traffic levels! I didn't even bother negotiating it down, even the negotiated price would still have been way more than I'm willing to pay.
2) Urchin: I don't know how similar/dissimilar Urchin is from Analytics, but the Urchin 6 software runs about $3k. This option could prove labor intensive since you would effectively be running and logging your own metrics on your own server. So the actual costs could go up (wrt to time, equipment, etc.)
There are plenty of smaller players in this space, but the problem that always comes up is, "Will these guys be around in a year?". When looking for an business solution, it's nice to know that your data won't up and disappear should the company go bankrupt.
I do wish Google would provide a paid service for those of us that could use it and would pay for it. I'm already using Google Doubleclick for Publishers for ad serving (which costs money), you'd think they'd also want to expand their other complementary offerings (like metrics).
Re: What to do when your site is "too large" for Google Analytics?
#9We do not want Google to know the true size of our service, so we have analytics code in every 5th pageview (when templates are constructed by scripts, it inserts the analytics code only when the UNIX time is divisible by 5.
Re: What to do when your site is "too large" for Google Analytics?
#10We do not want Google to know the true size of our service, so we have analytics code in every 5th pageview (when templates are constructed by scripts, it inserts the analytics code only when the UNIX time is divisible by 5.
What's the reason to hide your size from Google (or anybody for that matter)?