Effects of high-cardinality Google Analytics event label fields?

user_7705508 0
Viewed 105

I have a Google Analytics event label with high cardinality that I'd like to implement - it is a string that can take on any combination of a finite-but-large number of names in a comma-separated list.

I'm worried mainly about losing data - I found this Analytics Help support page: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1009671?hl=en

...which states:

Reports containing high-cardinality dimensions may be affected by Analytics system limits, resulting in the creation of a rolled-up (other) entry in the report to contain the data that exceeds these limits.

...and am wondering if that would also affect reports without the label included, i.e., reports just looking at unique category/action pairings - would GA still roll-up otherwise-identical into "other" entries if the (undisplayed) labels are different?

Also, am wondering if there would be any hits to performance for similar report types (not looking at labels, just category/action pairings).

Maybe this is just bad practice out of the gate? :)

google-analytics
1 Answers

Google Analytics stores daily, in the processed tables, up to a maximum of 50,000 rows (in Google Analytics 360 the limit increases to 1,000,000 rows, making the problem of data aggregation less frequent). As a result, many combinations of unique dimension values are stored for each table processed every day. If a given table has a larger number of combinations of values of dimensions, Analytics stores the top N values and creates a row of type (other) for the remaining combinations of values.

https://www.analyticstraps.com/valori-raggruppati-in-other-nei-report/

Anyway, I tried a custom report with label and without (same time period) and with label I got (other) while without that dimension I got the actual values.

So the problem you fear does not exist (unless the event action is also high cardinality) :)

user_56402000
Related