Core Reporting API Total results found

Question

I want to return a large result-set of Google Analytics data across a two month period.

However, the total results found is not accurate or what I expect.

If I narrow the start-date and end-date to a particular day it returns roughly 40k of results. Which over a two month period there should be 2.4 million records. However the total results found from the api suggests 350k.

There is some discrepancy and the numbers do not add up when selecting a larger date range. I can confirm there is no gap in ga data over the two month period.

Would be great if someone has come across this issue and has found a reason for it.

Answer 1

In your query you need to supply a sampiling level

samplingLevel=DEFAULT Optional.
  Use this parameter to set the sampling level (i.e. the number of visits used to 
  calculate the result) for a reporting query. The allowed values are consistent with
  the web interface and include: 
       •DEFAULT — Returns response with a sample size that balances speed and accuracy. 
       •FASTER — Returns a fast response with a smaller sample size. 
       •HIGHER_PRECISION — Returns a more accurate response using a large sample size, 
         but this may result in the response being slower. 

If not supplied, the DEFAULT sampling level will be used.

There is no way to completely remove sampling large request will still return sampled data even if you have set it to Higher_precission make your request smaller go day by day if you have to.

If you want to pay for a premium Google Analytics account you can extract your data into BigQuery and you will have access to unsampled reports.