Have you heard of Google Analytics? You should, especially if you have a website that requires you to track its data. 

Have you also heard about Google Analytics 360? If you haven’t, reading this article will be an eye-opener.

What exactly is Google Analytics 360?

Firstly, this tool is so named because it is the pro version of the standard google analytics you are probably using already.

Google Analytics 360 is a business-level analytics solution designed for big businesses and organizations that can give them access to more information than what Google Analytics’ free edition can offer.

A comprehensive set of tools is accessible on the Google Marketing Platform, of which Google Analytics 360 is only one component. 

Along with all the regular analytics features and reports in Google Analytics, your team will access additional analytics tools through Google Analytics 360, including Unsampled Reports, BigQuery Export, and Data-Driven Attribution.

A greater processing capacity, a service level agreement that covers data collection, data freshness, reporting, and access to specialized support personnel are all included in Google Analytics 360.

Read also: Everything you should know about google analytics?

Advantages of Using Google Analytics 360 over Free Google Analytics

Additional tools accompany the usage of Google Analytics 360 over the free version of Google Analytics.

Some are in the Google Marketing Platform but are now accessible to 360 customers like Google Optimize 360, Google Audience Centre 360, Google Tag Manager 360, Google data studio 360, and Google attribution 360, among others.

Google Optimize 360

With the help of Google Optimize 360, marketers can test user interfaces without having to write any code. 

From this point, marketers can determine which site/ad variation is the most effective for specific target segments. 

Google Audience Center 360

The data management platform integrates with Google DoubleClick, Adwords, and other third-party providers and demand-side ad platforms to support advertisers in connecting with customers across channels and devices. 

Google Tag Manager 360

This is the place to go for tag management of APIs and website code for faster workflows and more effective decision-making.

Google Data Studio 360

This tool helps with divisions within an organization that may rapidly share real-time marketing data visualizations. 

Google Attribution 360

This cross-channel attribution tool tracks all marketing expenditure data (both online and offline) to analyze channel effectiveness overall. 

The goal of the suite’s solutions is to assist enterprise marketers in integrating data from many platforms, including mobile, PPC, and offline marketing channels, to mention a few.

Also, using Google Analytics 360 provides additional features for those who subscribe to it. The features include: 

• Individual funnels random reports.
  
  
• Reporting in rolls and the timeliness of the information.
  
  
• Google BigQuery export and Advanced Analysis Access with Custom Tables Advanced integrations, such as those with Show & Video 360.
  
  
•  Google Cloud
  
  
• Google Ad Manager
  
  
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud and others

Another advantage of using Google Analytics 360 (ga360) over the Standard one is that even though Google Analytics’ free edition already offers excellent Google Ads integrations.

GA360’s pricing is readily justifiable since the extra data it collects can be used to improve your other paid ad platforms.

This means that, in addition to improving the features offered to other Google Ad networks, such as Campaign Manager, etc.

Google Analytics 360 also improves the performance of third-party networks, such as Index Exchange in Display & Video 360. Google has several case studies that demonstrate how the changeover enhanced things. 

One case study, for instance, claimed that Google Analytics 360 drives a 50% increase in MQLs or a 45% increase in ROI.

Google Analytics 360 Benefits Explained

– Data freshness

One of the advantages of using Google Analytics 360 is that it captures additional knowledge. With standard Google Analytics, it will take up to 2 days to process all your hit data. 

Google Analytics 360, on the other hand, includes a service level agreement that data is bound to be offered within four hours 98% of the time. Google jointly tries to process most data within 10-15 minutes.

– Traffic 

The reports will only be refreshed once daily for standard accounts that transmit more than 200,000 sessions to Analytics daily.

This isn’t always a deal-breaker, but it might be a roadblock for marketing and the business intelligence team if your organization is data-driven and depends on current data all day long.

Thus, the usage of GA360 helps to increase traffic through the continual refreshing of data.

– Unsampled reports

At the reading level, Google Analytics 360 has sampling applied even if there are over a hundred million sessions. 

However, for typical Google Analytics, sampling is applied to 500,000 sessions.

You also have the choice to access an utterly unsampled report if needed. 

This will increase the accuracy of your reports and ensure you’re creating choices supporting your data and options supporting your data.

The more data you have and the more you slice it, such as by applying a segment or filter, the higher your odds of sampling are in free GA. 

Sampling will likely be seen if you apply it to a section with moderate traffic going back a year. 

This is how you can determine if your data is sampled. 

You’re safe if a report has the green checkmark in the left-hand corner next to the report name. 

You’re in difficulty when it’s yellow. 

If you can apply your segments and check back a few months without noticing any sampling, you’re definitely in excellent condition.

– Individual Dimensions and Metrics

The ability to create additional unique dimensions, metrics, and audiences is another advantage of using Google Analytics 360. While the free edition only permits 20, GA360 allows you to build 200 unique dimensions and metrics.

With the help of these custom fields, you may record more details about sessions, users, products, and hits. As an illustration, you could record CRM data on your users, such as their purchase history or other demographic data. To analyze profit margins, you could also want to view the cost price on the product data.

– Specific Funnels

This includes Display & Video 360, Search Ads 360, and Optimize 360, and this feature enables you to share up to 2000 audiences with other Google Marketing Platform products to get the most out of your data.

It’s also worthwhile to investigate Custom Funnels, a tool that lets you examine how visitors use your website. With these insights, you’ll be better equipped to enhance the customer experience and remove roadblocks.

Also, you can establish Remarketing Audiences to engage your users again.

– Roll-up reporting

With the additional features of Google Analytics 360, such as deduplicating users, stitching sessions, inheriting custom dimensions and metrics, etc., you can quickly roll-up reports from many properties.

– Information-driven attribution

Google Analytics 360’s data-driven attribution modeling is one of its most remarkable features. In addition to the usual attribution models offered in Google Analytics, GA360 also provides data-driven attribution, which employs machine learning to build unique attribution models.

This uses data from connected accounts and Google Analytics, including TV ad purchases.

– More Help

Accessing specialized support personnel and other support is another benefit of upgrading to Google Analytics 360. There is a 99.9% uptime guarantee for reporting and a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee for collection. 

You’ll also get a monthly allotment of “ask us anything” support hours that you may use for analysis support, implementation, design, requirement analysis, and training. 

You’ll also have access to a dedicated account manager.

– Hits

The 10 million hits per month per property limit is the most significant Standard restriction. 

A hit can be compared to a pageview or any other additional custom event tracking that has been set up, for instance;

– Click tracking 

This refers to tracking a click on a button or other object. 

If a specific percentage or number of pixels have been scrolled down, that is the depth of the scroll. (A typical setup has percentages every 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%). 

When someone downloads your whitepaper, you get notified. 

Custom Path Tracking 

Also, if a user visits a significant number of sites that you wish to track precisely.

Unlike ordinary Google Analytics, which only allows you to export 50,000 rows.

GA 360 enables more profound analysis and allows you to export up to 3,000,000 data. 

Similarly, free GA only offers 20 custom dimensions and metrics; GA 360 offers up to 200. 

Custom dimensions and metrics in GA are user-defined measurements that aren’t predefined by Google Analytics, enabling GA360 to offer more adaptability and creativity.

All of these contribute to more significant amounts of hits per month, up to 1 billion.

Google Analytics has made things easier by allowing you to discover your current gauge of hits quickly. 

All you need to do is select Admin > Property Settings from Google Analytics. When you see the Property Hit Volume information, continue scrolling down.

Difference between Google Analytics 360 and Free Google Analytics

The main distinction between GA360 and Free GA is the sampling capabilities, which are more enabled in GA360.

Sampling is the process of selecting a subset of data to sample the overall trends and patterns present in the larger dataset. 

In GA, sampling happens after 500,000 sessions, whereas in GA360, it happens after close to 100,000,000 sessions. 

Compared to GA’s monthly cap of 10 million hits, GA 360’s cap is 20 billion. 

Any interaction that sends data to Google Analytics is referred to as a hit, such as when a user’s actions activate a tracking code.

Also, The monthly hit for GA360 is 1 billion hits per month, whereas free GA is only 10 million monthly.

The Custom dimension of free GA is 20 of each, while that of Google Analytics 360 is 200.

The rate of data freshness for GA360 is 10 minutes to 4 hours, and that of free google analytics is slower up to 24 hours.

There are also 50 custom variables. I’m GA360 and only 5 in free google analytics.

Similarities of GA 360 and free GA

Despite having so many differences, these two tools still have some similarities, which are the reasons why a user can still go ahead to use the free version if the need for it is suffices

•Ability to design unique reports in both

•Custom size options are available in both

•Reporting on mobile, video, and social devices and collecting real-time data 

•Tracking events 

•Possibility of creating various characteristics and views 

•Development of objectives 

•Groupings of content

How much does Google Analytics 360 cost? (Pricing)

It has been established earlier that Google Analytics 360 is the paid version of Google Analytics; hence the need to know the pricing is essential. 

It should be noted that, for its Analytics 360 Suite, Google doesn’t use a transparent pricing structure. 

The exact price for any firm can be decided upon following a discussion with Google’s Sales team and is dependent upon its business and data requirements.

Google Analytics 360 is, however, billed at a rate of $12,500 per month with an initial fee of $150,000 per year. 

Depending on how large the website is, costs may also rise. 

All of the Google Marketing Platform’s capabilities are included in the price as well.

Frequently Asked Questions on Google Analytics 360

•Who are Analytics 360 users? 

If you’re considering upgrading to Google Analytics 360, you might be curious to know if any of your rivals are already utilizing it.

Google Analytics 360 is typically used by enterprise-level enterprises and is most frequently operated by businesses in the automobile, retail, restaurant, leisure, and computing industries.

•Do I have Google Analytics 360? 

The likelihood of not having Google Analytics 360 is high if you’re unsure. 

By logging into Google Marketing Platform, you can check your account and see if Google Analytics 360 is mentioned under “My products.” 

If it isn’t, you might wish to upgrade to Google Analytics 360.

•Can Google Analytics 360 be applied to many websites? 

Yes. You can use a single Google Analytics 360 account to track all your websites. For instance, you can track each website separately if you have the main website, a shop domain, separate paid search landing pages, and multiple international websites.

The information from each property can then be combined and viewed as a single property using Google Analytics 360’s Roll-Up Reporting.

•When I update Analytics 360, will I lose my old data? 

This is a typical concern for businesses, but there is a simple solution. 

When switching to Google Analytics 360, your historical data won’t be lost. 

If you currently use Google Analytics, then this is accurate (free). 

In your property, your previous Google Analytics data will be kept (or properties).

If you want User and Event data to expire, you can specify a data retention limit, but it is not set to do so by default. 

However, you must transfer your historical data into a data lake like BigQuery if you are switching from another analytics platform that is not Google Analytics which you will no longer have access to.

•Why can’t I purchase a license for Analytics 360 straight from Google? 

Direct license purchases from Google are feasible, but these deals are usually only made by some of the world’s biggest businesses. 

Google seldom offers Analytics 360 technical support or consulting when selling direct licenses.

Hence, it is advisable to purchase GA360 from Google Marketing platforms.

•Is my company’s Google Analytics 360 ready? 

Make sure your company is prepared to maximize the value in the first year before investing in any enterprise tools or platforms. 

Here are five straightforward inquiries you ought to be posing: 

1. Is my group making the most of Google Analytics’ free version? 
   
   
2. Do we currently have any product restrictions that a business version might address? (In particular, business-critical challenges like data sampling.) 
   
   
3. Do I have the personnel in place who are qualified to oversee and ensure that the company is utilizing this platform? 
   
   
4. Does this expenditure help the company reach its customers more effectively and efficiently? 
   
   
5. Do I think there are good benefits to demonstrating an ROI to my leadership team?
   
   
6. Do I believe there are good benefits to showing a return on investment to my leadership team after the first year?
   

You may be prepared for Google Analytics 360 if you can affirmatively respond to “yes” to these five questions.

Final Thoughts

As it has been explained so far in this article. The usage of Google Analytics 360 largely depends on the need for it.

Even though it provides more additional features that benefit any given organization, huge ones. 

The need to gauge every available option is crucial before purchasing the premium plan.

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