Back to Basics: Tip for exporting rows

Monday, August 24, 2009 | 2:56 PM


As more and more people use Google Analytics to run reports for their advertising campaigns, we've had to come up with faster and easier ways for people to use Analytics for their everyday needs. One request that comes up quite often is to do away with 500 row export limitation for reports. Understandably, it's annoying to repeat your steps when you're exporting a report that has more than 500 rows.
We've found a helpful workaround that lets you export any number of rows in one go. We've listed the steps below so that you can bookmark this page whenever you need to export all the data listed in your reports.

Instructions

In our example Keyword report, you can see that there are over 3,000 keywords to export. This would mean that we'd have to hit 'Export' over six times!


To avoid the manual labor of exporting and then consolidating all your CSV reports into one, follow the steps below:

1. Go the report that contains the data you want to export.
2. Append "&limit=5000" (or however rows you need) to the URL displayed in your browser URL window, and hit enter to reload the report.

For example:


Before: https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/keywords....2311
After : https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/keywords?.................2311&limit=5000


3. After you've clicked 'Enter,' visually confirm that the URL displayed in your browser has the "limit" parameter appended to it. While there won't be any visible difference in the user interface, exporting will now yield more rows.


4. Select the Export tab, and click 'CSV' (not the option that says 'CSV for Excel').



5. The exported data should contain all the rows from your Analytics table.


We hope this added some precious time back to your Monday!

9 comments:

Erik Vold said...

This method is pretty much unusable imho, because if I go to a report at url X, then make changes to the date range, and other things, then these changes will not be reflected in the current url, and when I follow your instructions I will export data for the wrong date range.

The better way to go is to display your desired number of rows by the method I describe here: http://erikvold.com/blog/index.cfm/2009/7/20/the-daily-userscript-google-analytics-row-limit

This will ensure that the date range, and other factors, are correct, and save you from a redundant page load.

Erik

lovaxi said...

Thanks for the magic parameter.

But can I export the report with XML format?

I export XML format report everyday, and annonying with the 500 limit.

Julien said...

Hi Christina,

if memory serves, last year at the GAAC summit, we were told this was bad practice and would overload GA reporting servers if everyone caught on to appending large row numbers to the URL.

Are you guys actually recommending this practice now?

Follow-up: do you have plans to increase API retrieval volumes with a similar parameter?

hope to see you guys in Mountain View at the GAAC summit!

Julien COQUET - GAIQ

Aminadav said...

It's is not basic at all.
change the Title "Back to Basics" to something else

Comme une image said...

That's great but what about planified email reports? Even the 500 limit can't be set!

incrediblehelp said...

Cool tip. Why not code this into GA so we dont have to do this?

mnoah said...

You are my heroes! Thanks for the nice work around!

test said...

Is GAAC still active or has it been closed down? We had 6 employees take the test and submitted appilcation with no response?

Can you please advise the status of GAAC

Jeff Douglas
MVI solutions

Gabriel said...

Erik, thanks for the suggestion. This does look nice.

Test, yes, but I think you mean GAIQ. At the end of the test you should see your score immediately. We just launched a new feature where you can lookup our score. See the link at http://google.starttest.com/

Gabriel