The Cost of Implementing Google Analytics

Google Analytics is free to install and use with healthy limits that most businesses never reach. However, a useful Google Analytics implementation that provides you with custom events, usable dashboards and your required data layer configuration always carries a cost. Google Analytics can be added to a website in minutes however that only creates a basic measurement layer and won’t do much for your business until properly configured and augmented.

For serious users such as ecommerce firms, publishers, content-led businesses and go-to-market teams, the real cost sits in the work around the platform: event design, funnel mapping, consent handling, reporting, testing and integration with other systems. The more things you add in, the more expensive a Google Analytics installation becomes.

This article explains where those costs come from, what a basic Google Analytics setup can and cannot provide and how products like Truly Analytics goes further to include important functionality like traffic recovery, Network Intelligence and Event Hooks.

Free & Basic Google Analytics ¶

A plain Google Analytics installation is simple if you can edit the non-content parts of your website, such as the HTML head section or tag management layer.

A basic installation will provide:

• Basic traffic capture
• Page view reporting
• Device, geography and language data
• Standard engagement metrics
• A general view of visible traffic

For many small sites, this is enough to understand broad activity. It can show where users come from, what devices they use and which pages receive traffic. If you’re completely new and your site needs some rough idea of activity, a basic Google Analytics installation with no configuration or further tuning is a perfectly reasonable strategy.

However if there’s a serious business behind the site with revenue goals which the site contributes to then the basic installation isn’t going to cut it. It’ll be missing configuration such as:

• Custom events, such as recording purchases or important activity
• Configured funnels & customer journeys
• Product interactions
• Which content assets and pages support lead generation
• Ecommerce events such as add-to-cart, checkout, subscription or other conversion events
• Different reports for different teams such as sales, retention or customer success

A basic implementation gives you activity and an idea of movement. A proper implementation gives you decision-making data.

If Not Free Then How Much? ¶

The cost of Google Analytics implementation comes from the configuration work required to make the platform useful. A complete implementation usually needs several layers of work and an experienced consultancy who can help judge how complex or as simple it should be for your objectives. Some supporting products like Truly Analytics provide a lot of what Google Analytics is missing for a fixed price and are incredibly in depth, far beyond what you can ever achieve with Google Analytics alone.

Before events, reports and funnels are added the business has to decide what should be measured. This includes logically identifying and mapping events into a funnel that absolutely describes the user journey and what needs to be quantified and reported on. For an ecommerce store, this may include steps such as:

• Product views
• Add-to-basket events
• Checkout steps
• Purchases
• Abandoned funnel points
• Returning customer behaviour
• Campaign performance

For a content or publishing business the events could cover:

• Article engagement
• Scroll depth
• Video plays
• Lead magnet downloads
• Newsletter signups
• Resource access
• Returning reader behaviour

For a go-to-market team this would be different again with additional events and richer data such as:

• Product page visits
• Pricing page views
• Demo requests
• Account-level resource engagement
• Campaign source and medium
• CRM-linked interactions

This work is partly technical but is mostly operational. Here’s the reality, if your business is simple this is a quick step and could - in some cases - simply be guessed. ECommerce analytics is the simplest for this and the customer journey is already well known and documented. However, for a GTM team the customer journey is more complex and directly related to the activities that the GTM are taking, hence the customer flow may need constant changes and updates to follow the team’s changing activities.

Google Analytics has its own data model and your desired data will need to fit into those data objects such as events, parameters and dimensions. If your data isn’t provided in the right way then you wouldn’t be able to get it to populate into the right places in Google Analytics.

Aside from mapping the events and customer flow there also needs to be the modeling of your data with considerations such as:

• Event naming
• Parameter structure
• Custom dimensions
• Custom metrics
• Key event configuration
• Report compatibility
• Exploration usability

If the event data is not structured correctly you may not be able to get the reports you want.

Collecting events is only part of the work - Google Analytics still needs the reports for that data to be created and configured. This work includes:

• Funnel reports
• Exploration templates
• Conversion paths
• Landing page analysis
• Campaign reporting
• Ecommerce reporting
• Content engagement views
• Audience segments

Without reporting configuration, the business may collect useful data but won’t be able to see it.

A proper implementation should be tested across:

• Desktop and mobile
• Key browsers
• Important page types
• Forms and downloads
• Ecommerce flows
• Consent states
• Returning visits
• Campaign landing pages

Testing is where many issues are found. Events may fire twice, fail on mobile, miss parameters or break after a site update. This can be one of the major cost centers depending on how reliable your development team and technology current is. If delivery is difficult or unreliable then expect testing to be repeated and costly.

Example UK Costs ¶

General costs for set up vary from £800 - £1,500. Some UK providers quote up to £25,000 for complex implementations.

The easiest way to consider this is that a standard implementation will reserve a technician for 2 days of work: 1 day implementing and another day following up with testing and demonstration. If your usual technical resource is £500 a day then expect a basic implementation to cost ~£1,000.

If you’re looking at more work done beyond the standard implementation, then you can use the day rate as intervals. For example, if you want the basic implementation and then a couple days focusing on ensuring attribution and PPC integration then your budget should be:

However, even with an unlimited budget you still wouldn’t be able to fix major limitations in Google Analytics’ featureset. No matter how much time is spent on it you need specialist software to provide benefits such as:

• Recover blocked analytics
• Enhanced user privacy controls & EU compliance
• Extended sessions & consent management
• Network Intelligence
• Event Hooks
• First Party Attribution

Where Google Analytics Fails ¶

Blocked Analytics ¶

A plain Google Analytics installation only measures the traffic it can see. Many users block Google Analytics by default through:

• Ad blockers
• Browser privacy controls
• Hardened browsers
• DNS filters
• VPNs
• Corporate network policies
• Security tooling

This matters most when the blocked audience is also the valuable audience, and it usually is. Technical buyers, cybersecurity users, developers, enterprise prospects, government users, finance users and privacy-conscious users are often more likely to block standard analytics infrastructure. For some businesses, this means the best audience is the one Google Analytics can’t see.

Truly Analytics was originally built to address this problem. We worked with a cybersecurity firm whose Google Analytics reported essentially no traffic - we recovered 11.7x times the originally reported traffic. So we implemented the privacy layer to protect those users and recovered those business critical analytics.

Creating Truly Analytics was necessary - Google Analytics being part of Google’s advertising platform would always fail to give private and suitable analytics. Truly Analytics as a pure privacy conscious analytics platform needed to be a separate build and product to meet this goal.

No matter how much you configure Google Analytics you’ll always have this gap. If that doesn’t fit in with your target market then look into something like Truly Analytics for better coverage or build insufficient visibility into your planning, reporting and strategy.

Real-Time Events ¶

Google Analytics is useful for reporting, but it is not designed to be a real-time operational system for every business workflow. It can provide real-time basics, but those events are locked away in Google Analytics and not made available to the rest of your business systems for realtime updates.

Truly Analytics implements this through Event Hooks.

Event Hooks can send specific event data to Google Analytics and other systems at the same time, making selected analytics events available to CRMs, alerting tools and workflow systems.

Now your systems can accurately tell you when important data is happening from a single reliable source without having to run multiple analytics tools at the same time.

This is another case of Google Analytics having a hard barrier. If you want realtime integration with your other systems you’ll need to host them separately or utilise a service like Truly Analytics to integrate into your other systems.

Network Intelligence ¶

Standard Google Analytics provides basic geography and device reporting, but it does not expose the full network context that some B2B and GTM teams need.

Truly Analytics Network Intelligence enriches analytics at an aggregate network or organisation level, being able to classify traffic from mobile networks, residential connections, VPNs, proxy addresses, geolocation and publicly attributable organisation networks.

In other words, you can see who accessed your content and when from organisations such as:

• Government networks
• Enterprise networks
• Banks and financial institutions
• Universities
• Healthcare systems
• Technology vendors
• Consultancies
• Legal networks
• VPN or cloud networks
• AI labs and automated services

Having this audience mapping at a network or sector level is another incapability of Google Analytics - it needed a completely different product to fill this in. For account-based marketing teams, this provides the activity occuring from your target organisations with the signal routed into the right workflow, a complete game changer for visibility into your content and customer base.

Recommendation ¶

A free Google Analytics installation is suitable if you’re just starting out or you’re looking at basic traffic visibility. It works well for simple reporting and can be installed quickly and easily. Google Analytics is the main stay in the analytics space and therefore something you should probably have installed by default.

However, it’s not enough when analytics needs to support ecommerce performance, content strategy, funnel reporting, attribution, CRM activity or account-based marketing.

For those use cases, the cost sits in the implementation: event mapping, business analysis, report configuration, testing and system integration. You need to push Google Analytics further to make it hit that higher standard.

Truly Analytics is a great example of where Google Analytics could reach in terms of capability and functionality, however, it requires a completely developed from scratch product to hit that goal. Luckily, seen as we’ve put in the effort we can scale it to a cheaper cost than individual Google Analytics configuration, so overall it’s cheaper to get Truly Analytics installed than it is to tune Google Analytics to as good as it can get whilst still being limited in capability.

Start with a Trial ¶

Truly Analytics offers a free 3-day self-service trial. It requires no credit card, no payment details and no sales call.

The trial can run alongside an existing Google Analytics setup and can be installed on a single page, selected sections or a full site.