About Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free web analytics platform provided by Google.
It is also the most popular free web analytics tool on the Internet according to Builwith report (Feb 2016). It is a complete analytics platform offering solutions for collecting, analyzing data and reporting the results. Google Analytics offers also free APIs to export data to external systems.
Terms of service
The common question raises: is this great tool is really free? To be precise, according to Google Analytics Terms of Service:
Service is provided without charge to You for up to 10 million Hits per month per account.
If you exceed this quota, you should think about Google Analytics 360, former Gooogle Analytics Premium service. This premium and paid version offers you multiple times bigger data collection quota.
What is a hit?
As you can read above, your Google Analytics account has a 10 000 000 hits per month limit. So what is a hit?
According to Google Analytics help:
Hit - An interaction that results in data being sent to Analytics. Common hit types include page tracking hits, event tracking hits, and ecommerce hits.
Each time the tracking code is triggered by a user’s behavior (for example, user loads a page on a website or a screen in a mobile app), Analytics records that activity. Each interaction is packaged into a hit and sent to Google’s servers. Examples of hit types include:
- page tracking hits
- event tracking hits
- ecommerce tracking hits
- social interaction hits