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Limit of 30 items in a group by or Breakdown table?

  • 25 January 2022
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Amplitude seems to be showing an incomplete data set on several of my charts. I discovered this seems to be because the Breakdown table below the chart was set to only show the top 12 items (the chart uses a group by expression). 

I attempted to select all items but it maxed out at “Breakdown showing top 30” (when there are actually 35 items). The UI doesn’t allow me to select or show the other 5.  

Is this some kind of Amplitude limitation? I can’t find it documented anywhere. The docs say group by’s are limited to 100 for performance reasons: https://help.amplitude.com/hc/en-us/articles/360031259831

But 30 is nowhere near 100. Maybe there’s a bug? 
Thanks for any help.

 

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Best answer by jmagg 27 January 2022, 01:21

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Hey @patrick

I stumbled upon this issue last week while investigating a chart using group by and was only able to select the top 30 items in the breakdown as you mentioned. This looks like an Amplitude UI limitation as of now.

@Denis HolmesCan you help explain the “Breakdown showing top 30” in the UI vs the “With a single group-by in the Event Segmentation chart, results may be limited to 100 group-by results” part as mentioned in the doc? Thanks!

 

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Hi @patrick & @Saish Redkar --

That’s right! The 30 items limit is in place to keep the charts clean & so it’s easier to view metrics. A workaround could be to download the data as a CSV file & create a stacked bar chart in Google Sheets or a similar tool.

I am more than happy to submit a feature request to our product development team on your behalf to allow more segments to display on the Amplitude chart. Why would this be beneficial to you and your team? The context will help the product team better understand the request.

With regard to the “With a single group-by in the Event Segmentation chart, results may be limited to 100 group-by results” as mentioned in the doc, this means that only 100 of the possible values for the event/user property you are grouping by will populate in the breakdown table beneath the chart. For example, in this demo chart, I am grouping by User ID (which has TONS of values!). Only 100 of the possible values are showing in the breakdown table. However, if you export this breakdown table as a CSV, you’ll see 10,000 of the values for User ID. Feel free to read about this here.

Does this information help/answer your questions? 

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@jmagg : the 30 item limit in the visualizations has been an annoyance for us as well, at times. For example, our sport watches track over 70 different sports, so there are times where showing all of them has become wieldy, as we need to create three separate charts while making sure that there are no overlaps between them.

As a related note, I’d also love to be able to control how many different values User Composition charts show before grouping the rest into Other. 12 is a good default, but not being able to go higher can be bit awkward, especially when showing two cohorts side-by-side and they don’t share the same top results. In these cases one of the charts can end up showing only two actual values, with the rest in Other.

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Really appreciate the feedback, @MikkoKarvonen! I can see why those two improvements would be valuable. I’ve submitted two feature requests (one for each) to our Product Development team on your behalf!

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Thanks @jmagg 

Basically the scenario where it’s useful to have more than 30 items on the chart is when you’re grouping by sparse data. We have a chart where we group by first-time users. Or think in terms of a stacked bar chart for when users hit a specific product milestone. 

On your demo chart you have the top users active every single day over a 30d period but if user activity is more sparse with each top user active only 1 day over the period, then it’s not overwhelming to chart 50 or even 100 users. 30 group by’s with each one active on a different day over a 30d period would only be a stacked bar chart with one bar in each column. 

I do see how the devs could be concerned over running out of unique colors for the legend. However unique colors aren’t a requirement for us, considering that there is hover-over identification of data labels. So the 30 limitation seems fairly arbitrary, would be great to raise to 100. And/or display a warning above the chart when the breakdown contains more rows than the chart is capable of displaying.

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This makes a ton of sense @patrick! Thank you for taking the time to let me know how the Amplitude experience could be improved for you & your team. I’ve just learned from our Community Manager that the best way to submit feedback to our Product Development team would be to do so my creating an idea. Would you mind creating an idea and pasting your response there? I think it’s important for the team to be aware of so we can make improvements to the product. Also, just for transparency, I was able to submit a feature request for Mikko internally since I know his contact information. Since I don’t know yours and don’t want to ask you to expose it in a public forum, creating an idea is our best bet! Thank you for your thoughts, Patrick!

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