Google Analytics has many strengths as an analytics tool, but it has its limitations. A major one has been the restriction of only being able to export 500 rows of a report at a time. For example, the screenshot below shows that the report for Site Search Terms has over 22,000 rows, yet we can only select a maximum of 500 rows to display at once (number of rows displayed is the number that will be exported):
GA 500 row limit
It may not be particularly useful to look at all 22,000 rows, but even if we want to get a report on the top 2,000 search terms, we would have to create 4 reports, selecting 500 rows each time, exporting, then moving on to next 500. Tedious – to put it mildly.
Accessing data via the Google API offers one way around this limitation. However, the Google Analytic Blog has provided a more straightforward solution that anybody can use. In this Tip for Exporting Rows, it is explained that the 500-row limit can be overcome using these easy steps:
1. Go to the report you want to export.
2. Append &limit=x to the end of the report URL (where x=number of rows you want to export)
Example: https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/search_keywords?id=6146&pdr=20090727-20090826&cmp=average#lts=1251391512461&limit=2000
3. Hit enter to refresh the page (double-check to make sure the &limit= is still there)
4. Export as CSV.
Voila! Easy and efficient! Thanks to the folks at the Google Analytics Blog for sharing this trick.
Filed under: Google Analytics, Web Analytics | Tagged: GA, Google Analytics, report rows | 1 Comment »
