Getting Started With Google Analytics 360
Unsampled Reports and Custom Tables - Part 2
Now that you understand how sampling and row limits can affect your your reports,
let's talk about how you can use Unsampled Reports and Custom Tables
to further expand your reporting capabilities.
Unsampled Reports give you the greatest capacity in terms of data volume,
and are best used for ad-hoc requests on historical data.
Custom Tables are best used to support custom reporting
that you want to run on a frequent, ongoing basis.
To use Unsampled Reports, start by creating your custom report
or making your desired adjustments to a built-in report.
Then, select “Unsampled Report” from the “Export” dropdown in the top menu.
Note that you can create an Unsampled Report from most, but not all, report types.
There are two important considerations when deciding if an Unsampled Report
is the right solution for your need.
The first is that an Unsampled Report is set to a fixed date range for each report.
You can schedule an Unsampled Report to run once,
or at a regular frequency of Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or Quarterly.
This is great for extracting and using in external reporting,
but note that you can’t use these reports to do analysis
the way you would with other Google Analytics reports.
For example, if you want to be able to change the date range on-the-fly,
you might be better suited to using Custom Tables,
which we’ll cover in depth in a moment.
The other consideration is that Unsampled Reports
are allocated a quota per property.
This quota system determines a number of “tokens”
for each Unsampled Report relative
to the size of the requested report.
You are given a certain number of tokens
to use each day at the property level.
When scheduling an Unsampled Report,
you can see how many tokens are required for your report,
and how much of your property’s quota remains for the day.
Unsampled Reports that you’ve requested can be found
within the Customization section of the left hand navigation menu.
If you need to generate a very large volume of unsampled data on a regular basis,
or if you need more flexibility in analyzing across multiple date ranges,
Custom Tables might be a better solution for you.
Custom Tables are another Analytics 360 feature
that offer expanded data limits.
Custom Tables support Google Analytics reporting
in a unique way that can be highly beneficial.
While an Unsampled Report generates a static report,
Custom Tables store your raw data in a customized way.
This enables you to view built-in reports and custom reports
within the Google Analytics interface
with no sampling and highly expanded row limits.
Let’s talk about how this works.
We discussed previously that Google Analytics built-in reports
rely on aggregate tables behind the scenes.
The power of Custom Tables is that they allow you to define new aggregate tables
that you want Google Analytics to use when you request a customized report.
This new aggregate table comes with the benefits of a standard aggregate table,
but you get to decide what data it should store.
Let’s say that in the Analytics interface, you regularly need to add
“Device Category” as a secondary dimension to your Channels report.
But due to your traffic volume, the report results are sampled.
Whenever you request a report in the interface,
Google Analytics looks for the aggregate table
that most closely matches the report you just requested.
In this example, there is no aggregate table matching your report,
because of that secondary dimension,
making this an ad-hoc query that is subject to sampling thresholds.
But, when a report can use a Custom Table to return the data you requested, it will.
This means that if you create a Custom Table
that has at least the default dimensions and metrics of the Channels report,
and you include the Device Category dimension,
Analytics will use the Custom Table to return results
for the last 30 days and all future days.
Because a Custom Table is an aggregate table, your results will be unsampled.
In order to see what default dimensions and metrics your built-in or custom report contains,
you can click to “edit” the report in the top right of the report window.
Although you can’t create a Custom Table directly from the report editor,
this gives you a good view of the dimensions and metrics
that fully power that report.
Note the dimensions included in the dimension drilldown,
which would also need to be included in your Custom Table.
To create a Custom Table, go to Analytics Admin
and select Custom Tables under the property section.
Here is an example of a Custom Table
that has been configured specifically to support the Channels report,
but with the Device Category dimension added in as well.
Note that it’s a best practice to always include a Segment in your Custom Table.
If you don’t need a Segment for your report,
you should still add the “All Users” segment to your Custom Table.
This will cause Analytics to rely on the Custom Table
rather than any existing aggregate tables.
If you’re a regular user of the Analytics Core Reporting API,
you can also use a Custom Table to retrieve unsampled data via the API.
After your Custom Table is created, it will take some time to process.
It can take up to 2 days for unsampled data to appear.
Within a few weeks, you should see unsampled data
for the 30 days before the table was created.
New data will be added to the Custom Table each day.
This is important to note, because if the date range for your reports
extends further back than 30 days from the day the Custom Table was created,
your reports may still be impacted by sampling or row limits.
If you decide you no longer need a Custom Table, you can delete it.
Any reports that were using the Custom Table
will revert back to using the closest matching aggregate table,
or it'll be treated as an ad-hoc query.
Use caution when deleting Custom Tables.
You can’t recover the historical tables that were built over time.
Unsampled Reports and Custom Tables offer solutions
for many expanded reporting needs,
directly within the Google Analytics interface.
That said, some companies may find that using
Analytics 360 with Google BigQuery is their preferred solution
for the types of scenarios we’ve mentioned.
The integration with BigQuery enables you
to build your own reports using Analytics 360 data
that’s completely unsampled with no row limits.
We’ll discuss Analytics 360 reporting with BigQuery in the next lesson.