Google Analytics 360

80% of our clients use the free version of Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to power their digital marketing intelligence. In the right hands, GA4 allows for very sophisticated levels of customisation and provides all the data most organisations would ever need. However, for some larger or more advanced businesses, there is the option to upgrade to GA 360.

The GA4 version of GA 360 has an entirely new pricing model, making the entry-level license more affordable than its Universal Analytics (UA) predecessor.

With GA 360, you get the following benefits in addition to all the features of the free version:

• Greater data limits (more details in the comparison table below)
• Better integration with other Google products (scale)
• Account management and administration features
• Unsampled reports
• Bigger daily event limit for BigQuery export
• SLAs with Google
• GTM 360 features (free with GA 360 license)

While we can work around the data limits on GA4 for our mid-size clients, it can eventually become easier for the business to pay for a GA 360 license.

The key differences between the two versions are highlighted in the table below. We recommend looking at the official Google Support documentation, as these features change regularly:

As you would expect, the GA 360 platform supports integration and automation across Google platforms for its biggest advertisers.

There are a small number of important differences between GA4 and GA 360 in terms of account management. The main difference is the ability to create roll-up properties and sub-properties in GA 360. We lost the ability to create filtered views of reporting properties with GA4, but this option is available with GA 360.

However, creating sub-properties or a roll-up property in GA360 doubles up your hits, which count towards your license tier’s event limits, so you may generate additional costs with those properties.

Custom User Roles are another advanced GA 360 feature that expands on the level of access users can be provided or restricted from, when sharing access to your data.

We have already learned about the extended data limits for GA 360 users, including the threshold for data sampling in Explore and the UI being increased to 1B events.

GA 360 users can also request and download completely unsampled reports. Being able to quickly create a report within the UI and being able to request it with unsampled figures is useful and makes unsampled data accessible to the marketeer.

However, this may not seem like such a specialist feature when raw daily data exports to BigQuery are available with the free GA4 product, and that data is always 100% unsampled.

The free GA4 properties have a daily export limit of one million events per day that can be exported to BigQuery. The streaming export is always unlimited.

If this limit is exceeded, the account administrators are notified by email. If the limit is exceeded regularly, data collection and processing are likely to stop after the one million threshold has been reached.

For GA 360 users, the daily export limit is increased to 'billions of events', while the streaming exports remain unlimited.

Standard GA4 does not offer SLAs, meaning that Google does not guarantee any level of service and won’t support you if something does not work as expected. The SLA situation changes when you pay for the premium version of GA4.

You can find the full Analytics 360 Service Level Support documentation can be found here.

You are provided with support for:

You have access to support via chat or email, with the promise to have a response within 24 hours and 48 hours, respectively. There is a tier for how quickly Google Support will respond to technical issues of varying priority, with a P0 (highest priority) having an initial response time of 1h.

• First of all, GTM 360 is covered by the SLAs which covers container serving, configuration interface availability and access to dedicated GTM support specialists from Google.
• There is an increase in available workspaces from three to unlimited, and approval workflows are available.
• One of the most significant features is GTM zones, which effectively allow you to segment your GTM container into sub-containers and only load those sections in the relevant areas of the site. This feature is valuable for large implementations as it avoids loading the entire container and all its tags on every site page.
• You can also manage access to zones separately, such as creating an agency zone where the paid media agency can manage their own conversion pixels but not edit the GA4 tracking or see what other agencies are doing.

The license fee for Analytics 360, which varies based on the number of monthly events you collect, offers a cost-effective solution. Starting from around £2,500 a month, it is significantly cheaper than the Universal version of GA 360, providing you with a high-value investment.

Analytics 360 pricing is not straightforward, with pricing structures involving many variables and potential discounts and are closely tied to data volume/usage. The basic tier of Analytics 360 includes up to 25 million monthly events and starts at around £2,500 / month or £30,000 per year. Each additional one million events typically costs £10.50 extra, and with that additional event cost becoming cheaper with scale. We are not a Google reseller but work closely with a partner agency that provides us with the licenses and pricing for our clients. This ensures you are fully informed and involved in obtaining your Analytics 360 license.

With the total number of events increasing significantly, there are additional tiers where each extra one million events gets considerably cheaper, which provides a scalable solution. The more events you collect, the cheaper it gets.

The other costs you need to consider are BigQuery storage and query costs. For most websites, these costs are nominal and in the lower double digits, but if your website has a lot of traffic and you collect millions of events every month, then BigQuery costs will also increase.

The roll-up or sub-property features of Analytics 360 might increase license costs as their event code counts towards your total number of events with roll-up properties at 100% and sub-properties at 50% of the total.

• Example 1: You have three GA4 properties for UK, DE, and FR collecting 5M events each/month, for a total of 15 M within the basic tier. You now create a roll-up property that adds another 15M events/month, for a total of 30M, which means you are paying an extra £52.50/month.
  
  
• Example 2: You have a global property that collects 20M events/month, but you want to split it into sub-properties for the UK, DE, and FR, which receive about 5M each / month. These are counted at 50%, so you now have 20M + 2.5M events per new sub-property for a monthly total of 27.5M, which again exceeds the 25M of the basic tier. These are counted at 50%, so you now have 20M + 2.5M events per new sub-property for a monthly total of 27.5M, which again exceeds the 25M of the basic tier.

Some of the things we do for our Analytics 360 clients:

• Manage the migration from your current web analytics platform (like Adobe Analytics)
• Advanced implementation of GA 360 through Google Tag Manager
• Enhanced Ecommerce configurations
• Measurement planning and data strategy
• Reporting automation
• BigQuery data extraction and processing
• Create and manage data flows between different systems (AWS, Azure, DataBricks, etc.)
• Enrich GA4 data with other data sources (CMS, email, CRM, etc.)
• Build and maintain extensive dashboards in PowerBI or Looker Studio
• On-going support and optimisation of data collection Platform training in GA, GTM and Data Studio
• User journey analysis