{"id":8022,"date":"2017-07-27T15:48:27","date_gmt":"2017-07-27T15:48:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xpon.ai\/?p=8022"},"modified":"2023-05-22T23:08:00","modified_gmt":"2023-05-22T23:08:00","slug":"google-analytics-high-cardinality-dimension-warning-is-dangerous","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xpon.ai\/gb\/resources\/google-analytics-high-cardinality-dimension-warning-is-dangerous\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Analytics – High-Cardinality Dimension warning is dangerous"},"content":{"rendered":"
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“This report includes a high-cardinality dimension, and some data has been grouped into (other).”<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Have you ever seen a message like this in your Google Analytics reports? My congratulations and also my condolences! Congratulations because your business is attracting lots of traffic (hope you have a high conversion rate) and condolences because you have now reached the Google Analytics limit and need to deal with it.<\/p>\n

If during the day, the number of unique dimension combinations has gone over these limits, the values with lower aggregated metrics will be combined into one row using (other)<\/em> as the dimension value.<\/p>\n

Additionally, Google Analytics creates multi-day (4 days) pre-aggregated tables limited to 100,000 and 150,000 rows for free and paid versions of Google Analytics. This means you are more likely to see the High-Cardinality Dimension warning when you query more than 4 days of data.<\/p>\n

Why is High-Cardinality Dimension a problem?<\/strong><\/h4>\n

You may well ask, if Google Analytics summarises<\/a> dimensions with lower metrics into one – what’s the problem with the high-cardinality dimension? Those are very likely to be rarely appearing values and I don’t need them in my report. You are right. Well, most of the time.<\/p>\n

The thing is that the aggregation limit is applied during data processing. Once and for all. If you like to use the report filter option (see screenshot below) – you need to remember that any dimension values you are searching for might be hidden in the (other) dimension and therefore not displayed at all!<\/p>\n

\"High-Cardinality<\/p>\n

In the screenshot above, the page \/My-Rarely-Visited-Page was grouped into the (other)<\/em> dimension (row). If the filter is applied, no data displays.<\/p>\n

How to fight this<\/strong><\/h4>\n

The good news is that it is pretty easy to fight the issue. All we need to do is to tell Google Analytics not to use pre-aggregated data by:<\/p>\n