Group-bys: How Amplitude prunes and orders chart results
This article helps you:
Understand when and why Amplitude Analytics truncates group-by query results
Understand how Amplitude Analytics prioritizes group-by results
In its basic form, Amplitude's group-by feature is a tool for categorizing events for aggregation.
For example, when you want to count the number of events by country, you'd use a group-by:
Group-by result limits
For performance purposes, Amplitude sets a maximum limit on the number of groups a query result can return. When this limit is exceeded, the top groups are kept, while the rest are pruned from the query result. The top groups are determined in accordance with the table below.
With a single group-by in the Event Segmentation chart, results may be limited to 100 group-by results. For double group-bys, results may be limited to 500 group by results, in which each group by value pair is counted as a single result.
See this article for more details about limits in Amplitude.
Group ordering
This table shows how Amplitude prioritizes group-bys for display in the Breakdown Table:
| Metric | Ordering |
| Uniques | Number of unique users |
| Totals | Total number of events |
| % Active | Number of unique users |
| Average | Total number of events |
| Frequency | Number of unique users |
| Distribution of Property Value | Total number of events |
| Sum of Property Value | Sum of property values |
| Average of Property Value | Sum of property values |
| Distinct Property Values Per User | Total number of (user, property value) pairs |
| Formulas: Percentile | Total number of events |
| Formulas: Frequency Percentile | Total number of events |
| Formulas: Property Count | Number of unique properties |
| Formulas: Property Count Average | Total number of (user, property) pairs |
| Formulas: Default | Number of unique users |
Formulas with group ordering
For formulas without a group-by, this ordering is only used if every metric in the formula uses the same ordering. Otherwise, Amplitude uses the default formulas ordering.
For formulas with a group-by, Amplitude ranks the groups by the largest overall values per group summed across all formulas in a single expression.
Note
If group-by pruning occurs with multiple formula terms combined with operators, formulas may take longer to load because Amplitude runs additional queries to make sure that all formula terms are querying the same groups.
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July 5th, 2024
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