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This feature is only available in Analytics 360, part of Google Marketing Platform. Learn more about Google Marketing Platform. |
Analytics may sample your data to give you faster access to your standard and custom reports. However, sometimes you may need to access all of the data for a particular set of metrics and dimensions. With Custom Tables, you specify a combination of metrics, dimensions, segments, and filters that you want Analytics to process unsampled on a daily basis. Any report that matches a subset of the configuration1 of your Custom Table will then access that table by default, giving you fast, unsampled data.
In this article:Example
You have a custom report that is based on data from a large number of sessions, so it's always sampled. It has City and Browser as dimensions and Sessions, Pageviews, and Bounce Rate as metrics. You can create a Custom Table that includes those dimensions and metrics. From the table's creation date forward, Analytics will collect unsampled data for your custom report.
Permissions and limits
To create Custom Tables, you must have property-level Editor role. You can create up to 100 Custom Tables per property. You can view your property's quota usage at any time by going to Custom Tables at the property level in the Admin section. There, you can also view all Custom Tables created by other Editors of your account.
In addition Custom Tables, like standard daily processed tables, has a limit on the number of unique rows of data that can be stored per day. Unlike standard tables, however, Custom Tables has a limit of 1M unique rows per day for 360 customers, 925k higher than the normal limit of 75k rows. When there are more than 1M unique rows per day for a given table, Analytics stores the top N values3 and creates an (other) row for the remaining value combinations. See (other) entries in reports for more detail on the (other) row.
What data you can include
Not all metrics and dimensions can be included in a Custom Table, and not all reports can benefit from Custom Tables. User-based segments cannot be included. Because of the way data is stored or accessed in the following reports, they can't use data from Custom Tables: Flow Visualization, Search Engine Optimization, Multi-Channel Funnels, and Attribution.
Processing and availability
After you create a Custom Table, it can take up to 2 days for unsampled data to appear in the Custom Tables reports. At that point, you would have the 2 days of data starting from the creation date of the table.
Analytics also adds historical data for the 30 days prior to the creation date of the table. Under normal circumstances, that historical data is available when the new unsampled data is available (in approximately 2 days). However, if your property is undergoing routine maintenance carried out by the Analytics system, it can take up to 40 days for that historical data to appear. If your property is undergoing routine maintenance, you will see a message to that effect in the table.
Once you have created a custom table, Google Analytics attempts to access that data for queries that use the same dimensions and metrics or a subset of the same dimensions and metrics, for example, for custom reports or when you're using the Google Analytics API.
However, depending on the combination of metrics and dimensions, there may be cases in which Analytics is not able to use custom-table data, and instead queries standard aggregate-table data. As a result, those query results may include a higher degree of sampling than expected. We therefore recommend that your API queries and custom reports match your custom-table definitions wherever possible to avoid that higher degree of sampling.
To access additional unsampled historical data, you may be able to download Unsampled Reports.
Related resources
1A report can access a Custom Table's data if it matches a subset of that table's metrics, segments, and filters. A Custom Table can include more metrics, segments, and filters than are specified in the report, but the Custom Table must at least include all of the metrics, segments, and filters in the report.
3The top value combinations are determined by sorting the table by the relevant metric (e.g., Sessions, Pageviews, Transactions, etc.). Lower volume dimension value combinations are then aggregated into the (other) entry.