Q: My Exploration shows different totals than the standard report — one of them must be broken, right?
A: Neither is broken — this myth sends people on phantom bug hunts. They use different processing.
— Standard reports are pre-aggregated and apply Reporting Identity / modeling; Explorations query closer to event-level data with their own sampling rules.
— Explorations can sample on large date ranges (watch the green/yellow shield icon top-right); standard reports generally don't.
— Cardinality limits push rare values into '(other)' differently between the two.
Pick one surface per metric and stick with it for trend comparisons.
TL;DR: Explorations vs reports differ by design (sampling + aggregation). Different ≠ wrong.
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Q: My Exploration shows different totals than the standard report — one of them must be broken, right?
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