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Comment by fekberg | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't Google Analytics cost money after a certain amount of hits per day/month? If that is the case and the gap was hit, would MLB.com be liable to pay the fees?

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Google limit tracking to 10 million recorded events per month. Funny thing is almost know-one knows this of the analysts/developers/marketeers I work with and take GA as gospel. If you have a site with large tracking requirements you should look at paying or manually adjusting your sampling rates (if you have consistent traffic) otherwise results will be skewed to the earlier part of the month.

More reading: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1070983?hl=en

This is common knowledge for the marketers/analysts that I work with.

Have you ever run GA on a high traffic site or app?

Google gives you warnings. They're small at first, but when you're really hammering them and aren't paying for premium there are big red warnings about your data is getting heavily sampled. We have a relationship with Google, so they also personally reached out to us to ask us to fix the issue before they shut us off. I work at $BIGCORP so going through the procurement process is a lengthy process.

They just start sampling your data, the feature doesn't stop working.

When you buy premium, you get the unsampled data (and a person to call on the phone)

They don't just start charging you, they warn you that you're at the paid level and need to pay or stop using so much.

And then you can do nothing about it because MLB.com has outsourced their site and they stole your analytics codes. I guess you could change them, but still the question is: are companies that outsource to shady firms liable for copyright/damages that will result from said decision.

That's good to know, thanks. I've seen too many companies starting to charge you instead of giving you a fair warning.

The Paid version is called Google Analytics Premium and requires a contract in place between the client and Google or a reseller. You won't get a bill out of the blue just for being over limit.

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