Sampling Users for Effective Mixpanel Analysis

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Mixpanel offers query time sampling which allows you to query a subset of users to reduce report loading times while still getting representative results. This feature is particularly useful for enterprise customers with large data volumes.

Query time sampling is available to enterprise customers with over 5 million Monthly Tracked Users (MTUs) or over 2 billion monthly events. The feature works by: 1. Selecting a uniformly random sample of 10% of your total user population 2. Generating reports using this subset 3. Up-sampling the data by multiplying by the inverse of the sampling factor for appropriate metricsThis approach preserves data integrity since Mixpanel doesn't drop events at ingestion - all data is stored, and sampling only happens when querying. This means you can toggle sampling on and off depending on your needs.

To enable sampling in a report: 1. Navigate to the report where you want to use sampling (Insights, Funnels, Retention, or Flows) 2. Click the lightning bolt icon in the upper right corner of the query builder 3. When enabled, the lightning bolt turns blue and shows the percentage of data being sampledTo disable sampling, simply click the lightning bolt again, and it will turn grey.Mixpanel Documentation: Query Time Sampling

- When you save a report that uses query time sampling, Mixpanel saves a version without sampling to ensure Boards and saved reports use the entire dataset for high fidelity. - Functions like totals and uniques are up-sampled, while metrics that don't scale with users (average, min, max) are not up-sampled. - This sampling method works better as the number of users increases, particularly for customers with more than 5 million users.If you're implementing the SDK, you can also configure sampling at the collection level using the recordSessionsPercent parameter, which is particularly useful for Session Replay features.

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