Google Analytics - List event values per event label

Question

My current situation:

I might have the complete wrong approach on this, so please tell me if I should do this differently.

I send an event from my Android app to track DB load times.

• Event Category: 'DB'
• Event Label: 'DBLoadTime'
• Event Value: 2356 (Or however long the DB took to load in milliseconds)

In Analytics I would like to get a table view of all the different load times, listed under each other. From the analytics documentation I could see that they seem to accumulate all the event values as they are received. This means I can only get the total value, or an average value. however, they also use a similar example to what I have, where they use the event value to store 'doanload time' for a video.

My question

1. Is this at all possible, or are values from similar event labels accumulated by default, and there is no way to get them listed as separate values.
2. If it is not possible, how can I get this info? Maybe by sending the load time as an event label?

Why I need to know:

Highest value does not really serve me any purpose, as there might be one guy with one really slow device experiencing long load times, where the 2nd longest load time is already half of that. Average value does not tell me much either, as there are many people trying the app out, with just one or two records in the DB, which will always load fast.

Answer 1

It seems like what you want is a histogram to see the distribution of event values for that eventLabel and eventCategory. We've wanted to see the same sort of thing -- because seeing the actual distribution (or even quartiles) is much more helpful than just seeing a mean and a sum.

Unfortunately (d'oh!) GA currently does not support reporting histograms for eventValue. I've spoken with several of the GA developers about this and no one has said that this is going to happen sometime soon (d'oh!).

Thankfully, we've found a workaround that the GA developers have said is ok -- i.e. not in violation of a terms of service.

Instead of reporting the number of milliseconds that the device took to load, you can include this number as a string in EITHER a custom-dimension, or--in this case-- as the string in eventAction. This will allow you to report how many hits there were of each ms number.

If you are using the GA reporting API -- or the very helpful explorer -- then you can re-bin as you like, from which you can generate histograms to see the distribution.