Hit Count in Google Analytics

How Many Hits in my Google Analytics Account?

Hit volume is now available within in the Google Analytics user interface!

How to Find Google Analytics Hit Volume

Go to the Admin panel, then at the Property level, then choose Property Settings.
Scroll down to Property Hit Volume:

Why You Should Care About Counting Hits in Google Analytics

Google Analytics Standard, i.e. the “free version”, has a limit of 10 million hits per month per Account.

Notice that the hit volume now provided in the GA UI is at the Property level. This means that if your organization’s Google Analytics account contains more than one Property, you will want to sum up hits for each Property to see how close your organization’s Google Analytics account is to 10,000,000 hits per month.

What Happens if I Exceed Google’s Threshold?

Google is increasingly presenting warnings in Google Analytics accounts that exceed the limit and has cautioned that users may be prevented from accessing Google Analytics reports.

According to Google:

“If you go over this limit, the Google Analytics team might contact you and ask you upgrade to Premium or implement client sampling to reduce the amount of data being sent to Google Analytics.”

There’s Also This: Data Processing Delays

Lots of hits generally correlate with lots of sessions, so it’s important to also keep in mind that Google Analytics accounts that send more than 200,000 sessions per day are refreshed only once per day – resulting in longer data processing delays. 200,000 sessions per day equates to 6 million sessions per month and each session contains at least one hit, so in addition to placing data collection at risk, a very large volume of data will also possibly lead to data processing delays!

What Organizations Reaching the Monthly Hit Limit Can Do

If implementing sampling or reducing the amount of data being sent (e.g. by tracking fewer events) is undesirable, then your organization may want to consider Google Analytics Premium. Google Analytics Premium offers billions of hits!
In addition, Google Analytics Premium offers the following:

• The client (you) determines which Properties fall under the Google Analytics Premium umbrella
• Google Analytics Premium has a number of really useful features not available in Google Analytics Standard, like custom funnels, just to name one

What is a Google Analytics Hit?

A pageview is a hit, but not all hits are pageviews. This is also why Google’s new Property Hit Volume is so nice.

A pageview hits is recorded when the Google Analytics tracking code executes on page load. Google Analytics records data about the page itself (e.g. URL, page title), the technology (e.g. browser, browser version, browser language setting, screen resolution, operating system), traffic source and more. The tracking code sends this whole packet of data to Google Analytics as one hit.

Another example of a hit — other than pageview hit — would be an Event hit where data, such as event category, action and label would be included in the hit.
Examples of hits collected by Google Analytics include:

• Pageviews
• Screenviews
• Events
• Ecommerce
• Social actions
• User timings
• Exceptions

Where Were Hits Before?

Previously, hits was available as a metric but only accessible via Custom Reports. This Google Analytics custom report configuration link shows hits by medium, device category and date, if you want to try it yourself.

A couple of caveats:

• Be sure to use an unfiltered View with this report to get the most accurate count.
• Hits reported in the reporting interface are not the same as hits in Property Hit Volume, i.e. billable hits, because some billable hits are not reportable hits.