Congratulations, you are in the prestigious club of web analysts who get to work on a web property that generates over 10M hits per month.
I am sure by now you know that Google Analytics Terms and Conditions state that ”if you exceed more than 10 million hits per month, there is no assurance that the excess hits will be processed.” Many people ask, what exactly constitutes a hit? A hit is a pageview, a virtual page view or an event. Essentially, any transaction that stores a piece of data.
So, what are your options at this point?
Option 1:
Use client-side sampling to collect a percentage of your site’s traffic rather than the whole thing. Why would you want to do that? What matters the most is not the absolute value, but trends of the traffic. Client-side sampling will guarantee that if your traffic spikes as a result of a successful marketing campaign, Google Analytics will be able to keep up with the trend.
Click this to learn about _setSampleRate Google Analytics Tracking Code API function that allows you to control the sampling client-side.
Option 2:
Upgrade to Google Analytics Premium. GA Premium allows up to 1 Billion hits per month. Unlike many other high-end Analytics tools, GA Premium does not penalize you for a successful site by charging a higher fee based on the level of traffic. GA Premium has a fixed annual fee and provides a number of major improvements over the Free version of Google Analytics. We will talk about GA Premium in another post, but it is important to note that GA Premium has almost an identical interface as GA Free and the process of upgrade is as simple as sending your UA number to your Dedicated Support Team from Google.
As always, if you have an questions or comments about this or anything Google Analytics related, feel free to reach out via email: Alex@InfoTrustLLC.com.
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