Wrangling the Google Analytics Sampling Beast

After reading my last post, you have determined that you are really struggling with sampling in Google Analytics.  Now what do you do?

Your first option is to stick to the main reports on the left hand rail of Google Analytics.

The reports under these main categories rely heavily on roll-up tables in Google Analytics and therefore generally do not have sampling.  However, once you start adding secondary dimensions, filters, or custom segments, all bets are off and your sampling is likely to come roaring back.  While this can be very limiting, using these main reports is an option to remember.

A second option is to reduce the amount of data you are looking at, particularly by reducing your date range.  On the positive side this is a quick and easy way to deal with sampling.  The negatives are that this is really time consuming if you want to look at a large date range.  Second, you have to reduce your date ranges as your site grows.  Lastly, for some queries (e.g., unique users within say a month or a year), you may not be able to use this trick.  If you are looking at monthly unique users, you cannot chop the month into two date ranges because you don't know how much overlap you have between the two periods.

A related option is to use Analytics Canvas.  This tool basically takes the date range trick and automates it for you.  You can tell it to take a Google Analytics report for the past year and split it into 365 separate reports, each one day in length.  This is highly effective in dealing with sampling but again doesn't work for metrics like unique users.

The most comprehensive solution for dealing with sampling is upgrading to Google Analytics Premium.  There is no doubt about it - it is an expensive product at $150,000 per year (as of the time of this article).  In addition, to really exploit the data in GA Premium, you need to learn BigQuery, Google's Big Data tool.  If you know SQL, this isn't too hard, but there are some quirks for sure.  All these cons aside, the data that you can get out of GA Premium is amazing.  GA stores your data at a very granular level behind the scenes.  If you have worked with the GA API before, you will have seen a taste of what GA stores although the BigQuery interface to GA Premium exposes a far more extensive set of data that GA is collecting.  It can take some time to wrap your head around the data, but it gives you an almost limitless number of analyses you can run about your customers.

Sampling in Google Analytics can be a real drag, but now hopefully you will be able to wrangle that sampling beast into submission.