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.

group_by.png

For example, when you want to count the number of events by country, you'd use a group-by:

group_by_2.png

Check out this article for a more detailed look at group-by visualization in Amplitude's Event Segmentation charts.

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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