Forum Discussion
Google Analytics connector missing startdate/enddate parameters
Just to add some details. The issue is that Google Analytics does sampling. The more precise the query, the less accurate it becomes. See this page. Our use of the date dimension for filtering date ranges exacerbates the issue. So while we will likely fix this by using parameters in the future, keep in mind that the problem will always be there to a degree.
Yes, that is true. But sampling isn't an issue when querying one or two months, as my reports will do, but for longer timeframes (the start-date, end-date parameters you'll be adding to the cube) the sampling increases. My reported issue is, I assume you now agree, that you were doing client-side aggregation.
If you really want to get clever with your connector, then you have to have the query folding logic send multiple queries back to GA to reduce sampling. Google documents that approach in their blog, etc.
For example, if I query ga:yearMonth with start-date = jan-2014 and end-date = dec-2015, then for a busy non-premium GA site I'll likely get numbers that are slightly or way off. But if I split this into 24 separate queries with start-dates and end-dates bracketing single months, then I'll avoid sampling errors - at the price of making more queries.