That analytics report error taught me a hard lesson about sampling

I was sitting in my home office around 2pm last Thursday looking at a client's Google Ads data and thought their ROAS was crushing it. Turns out the dashboard was pulling from a sampled dataset because I had too many dimensions in the report. I had to redo the whole month's analysis and tell the client the real numbers were way lower. Has anyone else gotten burned by Google Ads sampling when you have a lot of data?

3 comments

3 Comments

cole_baker1mo ago

Woah, that's brutal, I started setting date ranges to force full data whenever possible and it saved my bacon.

gibson.avery1mo ago

Did you always know sampling was that big of a deal? I used to think it was fine until a similar thing happened and I had to redo everything.

david_jones381mo ago

Yeah its crazy how much we assume shortcuts are fine until they bite us. Its like that thing where you skip reading the fine print for years and then one day it totally screws you over.