If you have a busy site, you know the pain Fast Access Mode is causing you. Have sympathy for Google though. It is, after all, a free service, and you are making their servers work exponentially (factorially?) harder than most other businesses.

Some of you might be asking — What’s “Fast Access” mode. This mode alters your results if you are running a busy site. If you know anything about statistics, think of it as sampling, though I am not sure what Google’s algorithm is so I would rather not put a non-Google sponsored label on it.

One customer yesterday said they get 10 million hits a day. The size of the download was lengthy, causing timeouts, and they had to deal with sampled data. Yikes — In a way, I wish I had that problem!

Fortunately, I have the solution! The answer is to run a smaller queries, potentially one for each day, and build your analytics based off the results of those.

We have a technical blog article that explains how to do it. In short, there’s four steps:

1. Change your queries to create a data file for each day (rather than having a single query that fetches many days)
2. Change your analytics to load the data files, not query Google Analytics. These data files are on your own pc, not on some server somewhere!
3. Implement a scheduler to fresh data is obtained each day and
4. change the dashboards and reports to use the new data, and not perform queries to the data servers.

The big benefit is that there is no single large time-consuming error-prone download.

No Fast Access mode, no data sampling.

The dashboards refresh instantly because they’re not waiting for internet data transfers.

In fact, you pack the whole thing up on a memory stick and take it on a plane train or automobile.  Mobile GA, I like it!