I've signed up and testing an online Web Analytics service which offers me exactly what I need. Impressive stuff.

I was also surised to learn that our main website attracts much more traffic than we thought - about 10 times more that is (some had been running very erratic reports on our log files).

So now that I have to upgrade the package I signed up for given the much higher traffic. Fair enough. What  I don't understand,  however,  is why I have to commit to  paying for a certain level of traffic. How am I to know that the site will attract 1 milion page views a month and not 600,000? Or more?

We all know that traffic is variable... depenging on factors such as season, whether Google likes you or not, usability, etc... A web analytics company should know this more than everyone else!

So why not offer a pricing structure based on the actual usage? As in advertising. Which is fair.

Does anyone know, then, of a web based web analytics solution that prices itself in such a way? Another requirement is to be able to track multiple sites (and areas of sites) and collate results to get the overall picture.

Thanks,

Lawrence

I don't think that your analogy is correct. If the caterer is McDonalds than they can provide 1, 2, or 300 burgers there and then at £1 each.

How about pay as you go mobile phones? Or our utility bills?

And I don't think a web analytics company, or any company in fact, should be making their money from services paid for but not privided. It's fundamentally wrong.

If Urchin/Google can do it then anyone can. And I would argue that their mentality/policy is part of the reason they are so successful.

Urchin is a very good product and is extremely good value for money

Ashley was right to ask what sort of volumes you are talking about.

100k pages a month compared to200k a month is not going to make most vendors bat an eyelid. Thats the Big Mac end of town

Although 100Million a month compared to 200Million a month is going to mean a big difference when you are a big vendor paying big bucks for servers and licenses. ie. this might mean the difference between a £25,000 Oracle license and a £50,000 oracle license for them. Thats arguably the 'Al La carte' end of town.

The other thing to note is that you might be amazed how often you can negotiate people down on price.

Jon

As I mentioned to Ashley the pricing structure does not suit small businesses or companies on a tight budget. Fair enough, it might not be worth their while having clients with limited budgets. We can certainly afford the $500 per month we were quoted but I'm a cheapskate - I want to pay 500 bucks if I use 500 bucks worth of their service ;)

I'm working on the negotiation bit but also interested in Urchin. Do you know whether it is possible to track multiple sites (and areas of sites) separately as well as have a set of totals for all?

some vendors offer moving average pricing. so instead of counting your page views monthly. they count it as a moving average over X months. this deals with traffic seasonality quite well.

i know coremetrics offer this. not sure about the others.