Google Analytics is a great tool for tracking and analysing a million and one things about your website. That said, it isn’t perfect (fingers crossed Google doesn’t penalise this page in their search results for saying this). Sometimes there is a depth you need to add to your analysis that Google Analytics doesn’t quite have. Many things in life have a trade-off between complexity and optionality – that means as your options go up, the complexity does as well. In the case of Google Analytics reporting suite, they make it remarkably easy to use and pickup for people without a data background. The trade-off is less options for what you can create and visualise versus a dashboarding tool. 

My old friend, Power BI

My first thought after playing around with Google Analytics for a bit was “can I bring this data into a more powerful dashboarding tool like Power BI?”.  Power BI and I go way back.  I first used it in 2018 with my second consulting client, a couple years after it was released. What I’m always surprised by whenever I pick it up again is the continuous improvements and new features that have been added since the last time I used it.  I had a hunch they might have added Google Analytics Data interactivity, and I wasn’t disappointed.

What follows is a bit of my own experience doing exactly that, a bit of a showcase, and a bit of step-by-step tutorial if you want to follow along.

Tutorial: Navigating to the data

This part is surprisingly straightforward but also a bit more complicated than normal for Power BI. If you go to Get data, then click More…, you will see all the options for data import. Type Google Analytics into the search bar.  Then click connect and select the 2.0 beta.