As much as I like Google and their products, but "Dedicated Customer Service" seems really unbelievable to me considering their past of absolutely horrible stories of (paying) users trying to contact them. That said, I'm interested to see if this might change now that they explicitly advertise with it.
Considering that each paying customer could cover two to four customer service reps' salaries, I think this one Google product that won't have that problem.
Yes I think it is because we are spending a lot - sorry I can't say much but it's a lot. We've always had a 'google rep' and they rolled out the help line sometime this year to us. It's a 1800# and when we call it goes right to a person, no waiting. They do verify our account before giving us support. You can tell that the support is 'in house' and that it's googlers doing it, from the quality of the reps.
As others have said, spending a lot gets it. However, you should find an adwords manager ASAP as you would then have a point of contact if something goes wrong tomorrow.
As a one user Google Apps (paid) customer I have called Google several times and always got great support. If they can provide even the small customer like me with great support I think they're probably treating their bigger customers even better.
Yet another internet product not available globally. They don't need to license anything from the music or movie industry, so it the rest of the world does expect some sort of reasonable explanation of this limitation, especially when they write "we’re now ready to make it available to all interested clients".
I attended the Analytics Partner Summit a few weeks ago and this issue was brought up. It was speculated that they don't have enough support personel to handle customer problems across the globe.
You have to remember they are going after enterprise clients so expectations of service are very high.
"Prices varies per region and will be as follows: $150,000 USD (US), $150,000 CAN (Canada), or GBP 90,000 (UK) per year (billed in monthly increments)"
Wow, Google just got all up in Adobe/Omniture's face with this. Keeping in mind the total cost of an Omniture installation including licensing + professional services (since the product is tedious to use).
The disruption in the analytics space is really nice to see lately.
I think Urchin was under $100/mo at Rackspace, but I also think Rackspace had some sweetheart deal since they invested a ton of money at a critical juncture. We used to install it an awful lot, so it couldn't have been that expensive.
The enterprise market is paying for this level of service and $150K a year is a drop in the bucket. They are already paying it for Omniture and they pay it for the support that comes with it.
Providing a similar product of sufficient maturity with the same level of support (eg. human support) at a far lower price is not feasible, IMO.
Plus, the free product is already there. It's pretty hard to disrupt something that's already free.
To answer your other question, Urchin was around $500 / month for the hosted version and $5K for the installable version.
Really happy to see that Google Analytics has a monetization strategy. Hopefully they will start paying to the needs of their users more (and not let it keep on stagnating).
We are paying for a competitor product - which had the realtime support. We will seriously consider paying for Google Analytics when it comes time to renew licenses. And yes, we are hoping that by then they will have a version of their product that is between Free and $150K.
We are not paying them anything. But, we do want to pay them especially if it means that the product will keep getting better (and that it will not get axed).
I trust people more when I know where they are (or planning to) make money. If I don't see it - they have few reasons to be good.
I couldn't find a mention of Flash, canvas, HTML5 etc. so I can only assume this still uses their Flash charting. In this day and age that's really disappointing and short-sighted on Google's part. By not being able to view the charts (in fact, most parts of an analytics page) in an iPad or iPhone, they're forcing users to buy shotty third party apps and making other people rich.
FWIW, you could just as easily blame Apple for your complaint. There is no a priori reason to believe that Google should go out of their way to support a single platform from a competitor that is missing a piece of functionality; and, if they were, there is no a priori reason to believe that that platform should be Apple's iPad and not Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 (which is missing Canvas instead of Flash, a much more reasonable limitation given how often both technologies are actually used).
Missing support for the canvas tag really isn't relevant when IE offers VML and others offer SVG. There are some okay cross browser charting libraries out there, Raphael etc. And then there are the absolute stunners such as Highcharts, which has been a pleasure to work with.
For a technology-driven company to revamp aspects of their product whilst ignoring what is a widely held complaint, it just boggles the mind. I don't see how the decision to use Flash can be defended in this day and age, regardless of whether Metro IE10 drops support for Flash or not.
Apple at least pretends to be limited by technology, eg: battery life for Flash. It would take about 15 minutes to prototype it with a jQuery date selector and Highcharts supporting legacy desktop browsers and mobile devices alike. Nothing about it is remotely difficult.
But if it's competition they fear (in an entirely different SBU), why not address the shortcomings that drive people to use Mint and other analytics services?
I really can't believe I'm having this argument (and downvotes to boot). I've converted many Flash and Silverlight applications back to HTML5/JavaScript. I only ever really get stuck at File IO, which is irrelevant here. Maybe I should have taken that job offer at Google.
"...why not address the shortcomings that drive people to use Mint and other analytics services?"
FWIW, the main selling point of Mint over Google Analytics is "up to the minute reporting" (or at least, it was, before Google "addressed" that particular shortcoming). As someone who used to find Analytics "only able to tell me stuff I wish I knew yesterday", I'm now super-excited to dive in.
This is not true or misunderstood. Even now, as I look at on of my dashboards, the last reported hour was 13:00 -- it is 17:30. As well, there is no data for three of the morning hours, where this asset has not been down and sees millions of impressions a day. No to mention, the feature page for this new product states, "Processing: data freshness within a maximum of 4 hours 98% of the time," [1] which is not too far off a typical day with a non-premium plan.
"We just turned the reports on for a number of you, and over the coming weeks, everyone will have access to Real-Time. If you can’t wait, sign up for early access here: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/realtimeanalytics/. We’d love to hear about how you are using (or planning to use) Real-Time, so please share in the comments."
Google likely benefits hugely from providing the service for free. The massive amount of data it provides about user behaviour across the public Internet must be hugely valuable to them.
I always thought the real goal of Google Analytics was to upsell me into using Adwords, and to prove once and for all that there's no point in optimizing for any search engine except for google.
the real goal of free Google Analytics is to get people to place the javascript tracking snippet on their webpages so they can collect data for Ads and now paying customers.
