---
title: Sampling
slug: analytics/docs/sampling
createdAt: 2026-07-20T15:45:17.309Z
---

Sampling is a query performance optimization technique that uses a representative sample of data for queries instead of the entire dataset. You can pick a fraction of the data in your dataset, run queries on it, and get highly accurate results instead of analyzing all the data in it. There are two options available.

1. **Faster Response** – When you select this mode, the system uses a lower sampling rate that provides faster query response time but lower precision of results. This is the default mode when you enable sampling.
2. **Higher Precision** – When you select this mode, the system uses a higher sampling rate that provides higher precision of results but lower query performance.

## Sampling in explorations[​](https://app.netspring.io/documentation/docs/Explore%20Data/sampling#how-does-sampling-work-in-explorations)

If an exploration is sampled, every data point in the resulting visualization has an error bound, which is shown in the tooltip for that data point. This is a 95% error bound, a percentage of the data point. For example, if the data point's value is 100, and the error bound is 1%, then there is a 95+% chance that that data point's true value (unsampled) is between 99 and 101.

To help assess the accuracy of a sampled visualization at a glance, you can highlight data points with >5% error with red dots. The sampled indicator shows or hides these highlights.

[Contact Optimizely Support](https://support.optimizely.com/hc/en-us) to set up sampling in your application.

1. Go to **Settings > General Settings > Sampling**.
2. Enable the **Enabled** toggle under **Sampling**.
3. Enable the **Always Highlight High Errors** toggle to see high errors.
4. Set the **High Error Limit** and the **JSON Indexing Sampling Rate**, which is the percentage of events or rows sampled to determine the structure of JSON data during indexing.
5. Set the **Faster Response** and **Higher Precision** level.
6. Click **Save**.

![opti-sam-1.png](https://api.archbee.com/api/optimize/BrbvVORKJ5iIeSMZye5kI/vZ9UdhjH_fWBMBBwis-1o-20260720-144853.png)

Now, you can configure sampling inside an exploration.

1. Click the lightning icon in the visualization module within explorations to configure sampling modes for your exploration.

   ![opti-sam-2.png](https://api.archbee.com/api/optimize/BrbvVORKJ5iIeSMZye5kI/wnE_SH87m6DbI8-cSmtYm-20260720-144853.png)
2. Choose one of the two sampling modes: **Enabled – Faster Response** or **Enabled – Higher Precision**.

   ![opti-sam-3.png](https://api.archbee.com/api/optimize/BrbvVORKJ5iIeSMZye5kI/Gun4akJABoUCtuAYDUede-20260720-144853.png)

:::Paragraph{indent="1"}
The data sampling displays as green or red dots in your visualization.
:::

3. Click the **Sampled** indicator and then **Hide Sample Errors** to hide the errors in the chart.

   ![sampling-new-ebf9ab80e4b78e7d18a8bdf796f3e0d2.png](https://api.archbee.com/api/optimize/BrbvVORKJ5iIeSMZye5kI/gjZ4PY9fJMVnM2rYLZvre-20260720-144853.png)