Professional Google-certified web analyst here. According to the terms of use I'm familiar with, linking an AdWords account to your GA account, and spending mo

Professional Google-certified web analyst here. According to the terms of use I'm familiar with, linking an AdWords account to your GA account, and spending money on it (even nominal sums like a buck fifty) has been sufficient to be exempt from any hit limits on GA. Your AdWords account does need to be explicitly linked to the GA account, and you do need to be spending some non-zero amount of money, but they're easy to connect and that's honestly still quite cheap for an analytics implementation. Omniture SiteCatalyst will run you in the six figures per year, minimum. It's possible that Google has changed its policy, as Google has a reputation for being somewhat fickle as an analytics provider, but I haven't heard anything via official channels. That aside, only having your data update once a day should not be a problem. There is surprisingly little value in data updating multiple times per day. There's no reason to have data update more frequently than you can take action upon it, and most sites of most companies move at the speed of a glacier. There are a few business models where it is beneficial, for example news sites can benefit from knowing what stories are really popular right this minute. Besides, if you need data more often than once a day, you shouldn't be on Google Analytics anyways. Average data delay is a few hours, but it's not unheard of for data to be stale by a day or two.