We often receive questions about what customers get when they upgrade from the free version of Google Analytics to Google Analytics 360. The quick answer is that you get a lot – the possibilities are literally endless – as long as you’re a big, data-driven company willing to put energy into customer engagement and marketing.
Google emphasises that their enterprise analytics are designed to help large companies, like major ecommerce sites, create better customer experiences. But what does that mean in practice? There are a lot of details to understand if you’re thinking of transitioning to the big paid version of Google Analytics.
The main differences lie in how each product deals with the volume of data and integrations that they have available by default. I’ve broken those differences down into three categories: Data Collection, Data Sampling and Data Sources.
Data collection
In short, Google Analytics 360 allows for a faster, smarter, larger data collection. With unlimited hits per month and up to 200 custom dimensions per web property.
Features | Google Analytics (free) | 360 Suite (paid) |
Hits per Month | up to 10M | unlimited |
Custom Dimensions/Metrics | 20 Per Property | 200 Per Property |
Calculated Metrics | 5 Per View | 50 Per View |
Properties per Account | 50 | 50+ |
Views per Property | 25 | 25+ |
Roll-Up Properties | No | Yes |
Data Freshness | 24 – 48 hours | 4 Hours |
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Data sampling and limits
As your web traffic grows, Analytics 360 lets you get more out of both sampled and unsampled data sets. Compared with the standard version of GA, you get better reporting on large amounts of data. Understanding how data is sampled in Google Analytics will help you scale the smart way.
Features | Google Analytics (free) | 360 Suite (paid) |
Report Row Limit per Day | Yes | Yes |
Standard Reports Pre-Aggregated | 50K | 75K |
Sampling in Ad-Hoc Reports | 500K Sessions per Property | 100M Sessions per Property |
Custom Tables | No | 100 |
Custom Table Report Row Limit per Day | No | 1M Rows |
Unsampled Reports | No | Yes |
Unsampled Report Row Limit | No | 3M (for download) |
Data sources
The 360 Suite makes it especially easy to pull in data from a wide range of advertising platforms and sources, including non-Google products like Salesforce. For some of our enterprise customers, especially large ecommerce sites with a focus on PPC lead gen and retargeting, the ability to seamlessly integrate with DoubleClick is itself enough to make their 360-buy worthwhile!
Features | Google Analytics (free) | 360 Suite (paid) |
AdWords | Yes | Yes |
AdSense | Yes | Yes |
DoubleClick Campaign Manager | No | Yes |
DoubleClick Bid Manager | No | Yes |
DoubleClick For Publishers | No | Yes |
Custom Data Sources | Yes | Yes |
Query-Time Data Import | No | Yes |
Salesforce | No | Yes |
BigQuery | No | Yes |
Additional perks (GTM 360, beta testing)
In addition to the above benefits, being able to connect Google Analytics to other Google 360 Solutions like Google Optimize 360 and Google Tag Manager 360 is a big plus. As an added perk, Analytics 360 clients often get early access to beta programs for testing and product feedback — getting directly involved with product development to suit their needs — plus first-hand support from Google.
Google 360 can be purchased directly from Google or through a sales partner. We don’t currently sell the 360 Suite ourselves, but we’ve been a certified Google Analytics Service Partner since 2015, including Google Tag Manager and Google Optimize certification, and have extensive experience with custom tagging and reporting.
Plus, we built the Littledata app around those analytics best-practices. Our larger consulting clients get the most benefits out of our enterprise plans, which include automated analytics audits, unlimited access to app features, custom setup and reporting, and a dedicated account manager to help ensure deep, accurate tracking.
Whether or not you’ve already upgraded to Google Analytics 360, we highly recommend getting in touch to make sure you’re able to use this powerful tool to its full potential!