Adobe Analytics pricing

How pricing works

Adobe Analytics is sold on a contract rather than from a price list, so the page above has no volume steps to plot. What the vendor documents in public is the meter and the way a commitment is tracked.

The unit is the server call, which Adobe’s admin guide also calls a hit or an image request: one instance of data reaching Adobe servers for processing. The most common server call is a page view. Other kinds, among them exit links and file downloads, send data without recording a page view. Page views excluded from reports, through an IP address range for example, are still server calls, because Adobe receives and processes them.

Server calls are provisioned by type. Primary calls arrive from visitor browsers or the data insertion API. Secondary calls are copies created by multi-suite tagging or by a VISTA rule, and one that is moved rather than copied is deducted from the primary count. Mobile primary and secondary calls come from the mobile SDKs, and a company entitled only to mobile calls has its web traffic counted against that commitment too.

When the contract is signed, Adobe and the customer agree which types of server call are included and roughly how many are expected over the contract period; that is the server call commitment. It is then divided into usage periods, which need not match the contract term or the billing cycle: an annual contract can entitle a number of calls per month, making the usage period a month. Commitment and consumption span every login company under the contract, and some entitlements, such as video measurement, are tracked apart from server call usage.

Inside the product, a server call usage report compares consumption with the contractual limit, and an alert type warns administrators about the risk of an overage or one already incurred.

Questions and answers

What stays out of public view?

The rate for a server call, the minimum commitment, the length of a term and what a given contract includes are all set in that contract, and the documentation does not carry them. A figure comes from the Adobe sales team.

Can calls you never agreed to appear on the bill?

Secondary calls can arrive without being provisioned, for example when data goes to more than one report suite. Adobe’s FAQ says the consequence depends on the contract: sometimes the secondary volume is taken from the primary commitment and drains it faster than expected, sometimes it is billed separately while primary calls remain unused. The vendor’s advice is to check the contract or ask the account team. What the product measures is on the Adobe Analytics card.