I am a big fan of Econsultancy because of the quality of the work these guys do. In case you missed it they published their 5th Online Measurement and Strategy Report 2012 today. As with the previous reports, it’s fascinating snapshot on where web analytics is right now – both as a process and as an industry.
What got my attention are the GA Premium numbers…
Apart from 86% of companies using Google Analytics (same as last year), what caught my eye was the 5% of GA users now using the Premium (paid-for) version. I wrote about the paid-for version of GA when it launched late last year (Should you pay $150,000 for your web analytics tool?). There are several facets to it, as I describe in the my post, but essentially it comes down to more horse power. That is, if you receive more than 10m pageviews+events per month, you need to seriously consider Premium.
So after 8 months of Premium being available, its adoption numbers are impressive. Speaking with Andrew Warren-Payne and Linus Gregoriadis at Econsultancy, here are some follow-up numbers (not available in the report):
- Of the 314 respondents who answered the question as to whether or not they used GA Premium, or if they used a paid-for tool, 146 stated they paid (i.e. 46% of respondents use a paid-for tool).
- Of the 146 using a paid-for tool, 12 pay for Google Analytics Premium (i.e. 8% market share of paying analytics users).
- Of these 12, nine use GA Premium in conjunction with another paid tool, and three use GA Premium exclusively.
An 8% share of the paid-for market may not sound much for GA Premium – the report shows 50% of this market uses Adobe products. However, its gone to this in 8 months form zero. It will be interesting to see what the growth pattern will be in future reports. Plenty of opportunities for competitors to differentiate themselves – though whether they take them, or focus their efforts on dumbing down GA Premium (as they did with the free version) is another matter.
I will stick my neck out and predict that GA Premium will have a 50% market share of paid-for web analytics tools in 3 years time… What are your thought’s?
Thanks for the post Brian, and I look forward to our survey in three years time to see if your predictions for market share for GA Premium does come true.
@John, as you asked, I thought I would share some further numbers with you to answer your question:
– For the 146 respondents using paid-for tools, the average number of paid-for tools they use is 1.5
– For those using GA Premium in addition to another paid-for tool, the average total number of paid-for tools they use is three (inclusive of GA Premium).
– The most commonly used tools for these nine respondents who state they use GA Premium with another paid-for tool are Webtrends (five respondents) and Nielsen (four respondents).
Obviously due to the very small sample size here I can’t say this is completely representative of the market, but it is interesting to see how quite a few companies are using multiple web analytics tools.
Interesting stats and thanks for this post. In terms of using GA Premium in conjunction with another tool, what other tools were respondents using? It seems to me like any analytics organization worth their salt should be using multiple tools to analyze and interpret their data. We use several tools, for web stats, SEO analytics, clickstream analysis, user sentiment, etc.