Google Analytics Universal Analytics - Date range issue while viewing all Pages (Site Content Pages)

Question

I am using Google Analytics- Universal Analytics property, and using a custom dimension "UserName" (Scope = User). I am trying to view all pages/ page URLS a particular user has travelled in the website. I am trying to filter using the "UserName" custom Dimension in Behaviors -> Site Content ---> All pages.

This particular user whom I am filtering has done some activity on some dates and in other dates no activity.

For example - Sept 1st and Sept 2nd he has visited some pages, other dates like Aug 30, Aug 31 no visits.

When I am trying to see the page view -- by filtering this user in Custom Dimension - When I select the dates specifically which he has done activity data is displayed in the graph and table.

When I select random date range -- which is a combination of (activity dates and no activity dates), data is not displayed in the table - shows No data but in the graph above data is shown. Attached the Image.

How to proceed with this issue ? Is this an issue for GA side ?

Answer 1

GA UI is severely limited. Especially when you start using custom definitions and drilling into larger segments of data. This may be a result of sampling. Or just a UI bug.

I would suggest either ETLing your data from GA or just use a BQ connector. SQL doesn't lie. GA does.

You could also consider using an excel/google sheets plugin to write your GA query and download raw data to the file if real DBs look intimidating/expensive.

Finally, if it's just a one-off ad-hoc analysis that you need to do, then you could just use the User Explorer tool in GA:

The report, however, uses Client IDs rather than your user IDs, but it's a good practice to stuff GA client ids in a custom dimension. If you do that, you will be able to map your user ids to GA client ids and make use of the user explorer. Again, this is for ad-hoc only really.