If you have encountered a warning in Google Analytics threatening to stop data processing, and even delete your property if you don’t upgrade to Google Analytics Premium – you are probably worried about your data and wondering what your options are. This quick guide will give you and answer to this, and give you an idea of what your considerations should be.
The reason for this warning is that the Google Analytics property in question is receiving more that 10 million hits per month, which is the limit of the data quantity that Google will process for non-premium properties.
The total hit volume is determined by a number of website actions such as pageviews and events. The hit volume can increase rapidly if you, for instance, implement many events on your website. You can monitor your hit volume in the Google Analytics Admin-tab under property settings.
My “Property Hit Volume” is to large – What are my options?
If you have determined that your website is sending more than 10 million hits per month, or you are approaching the limit, you have the following options:
- Do nothing
- This requires no action, and is free of cost, but the worst case scenario is that Google deletes your property and all the data along with it. Best case scenario, Google continues to process your data but you will experience higher levels of sampling, which will the data-accuracy
- Reduce the hit volume
- You can decrease the hit volume by reducing the “Sample rate” in the tracking code on your website – this will result in less data-precision as only a part of the data is processed
- You can remove non-critical events as well as social interactions and user timings, which will decrease you hit volume, but you will loose the insights from the elements that have been removed
- Upgrade to Google Analytics Premium
- Google Analytics Premium is not free of cost, but there is practically no limit to data collection and the processing is faster. Here you can read more about the advantages of Google Analytics Premium
Regardless of what you choose it’s important to be aware of the issue and the quality of your data. If you are using data to make business critical decisions, you should make sure that your tracking implementation gives you an exact picture of your website value creation, using data you can trust.
eCapacity is an independent consultancy with extensive experience in using digital analytics as a strategic platform for optimizing the online experience. Contact us to find out how we can help your business.
