Google Analytics Premium Edition was announced last week.  This is tactically and strategically very exciting.  As the Google Analytics Premium site tells us (http://goo.gl/e1ge1):

[Google Analytics Premium is] Now being used by some of the world’s most well-known organizations, Premium increases the power and ease of Google Analytics for your business. All for one flat-rate annual fee.

So, it’s already in the wild. What does it mean from a technical perspective?  The big headline is the freshness of the data.  The sheer processing power used to deliver data that is a maximum of 4 hours old 98% of the time is serious.  This processing power also raised data limits – up to 1 billion gif hits per month and the ability to download high volume unsampled reports.

An intriguing development is the increase of the custom variable limit to 50.  FIFTY! Imagine the advanced segmentation possibilities – 50! (50 factorial = 3 x 1064) advanced segments downloaded in unsampled reports.  Many analysts may fear fragmented data although if you’re dealing with large volumes and need more than 5 custom variables then this may be a current pain point rather than a risk.  Who would need such reporting horsepower?  If you’re conducting large scale RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary Value – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFM) analysis, the more fine grained you can make your attribute categories the better.

You may be wondering if these new features and capabilities require any change to tracking codes currently used?  No – and that is sweet.  Once you’ve signed up to use GA Premium – the change is made at Google’s end – not yours – until you need to go beyond 5 custom variables.

The feature list for Google Analytics Premium shows this is an enterprise scale product.  The roadmap should also make interesting reading but we’re not all privy to such sensitive information!   Premium is highly complimentary to the Standard Edition – both are extremely capable and powerful tools that compliment savvy Web Analysts and data driven marketers.  The future looks bright for the Google Analytics product suite.