Reply To: Optimizing Data Extraction from Google Analytics 4 API

[Brett]

The differences in data you’re noticing between Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and Universal Analytics (UA) could indeed be due to data sampling. Sampling is a method Google uses to generate quicker reports. For large data sets, it only processes a portion of the data (sample) instead of the entire data set. One way to minimize the effect of sampling is to reduce the size of the data you are requesting in each API call. In your code, you are currently requesting to pull 100,000 rows per call. This could potentially cause sampling, as Google may decide to sample reports with large amounts of data to reduce processing time. Try reducing the limit value in your request to a lower number and see if that reduces the discrepancy between GA4 and UA data. Remember to adjust your offset accordingly, to ensure you are collecting the entire data set across multiple API calls.