Google Analytics Dashboard in Power BI
Creating My own tailor made Analytics dashboard
As a data enthusiast, I enjoy analyzing and visualizing data, and one of my favorite ways to do this is by creating dashboards. When I launched my website in 2022 to share tutorials and articles on Power BI, I quickly became curious about tracking my site’s performance. Specifically, I wanted to know which articles are most popular, the engagement rate, and how much time users are spending on each page. To gather these insights, I rely on my Google Analytics dashboard in Power BI, which helps me refine my content and enhance the user experience.
Google Analytics provides a dashboard to track these metrics. However, as someone who primarily works with Power BI, I found myself constantly switching between tools to access the data. I prefer having all my insights in one place—especially in Power BI where I can integrate Google Analytics data into my existing dashboards.
Luckily, integrating Google Analytics data into Power BI is simple, thanks to the Power BI Google Analytics connector (which is free!). All you need is access to your Google Analytics account and a clear idea of what insights you want to track.
Why build a Google Analytics Dashboard in Power BI?
Creating a Google Analytics dashboard in Power BI not only streamlines your workflow but also helps centralize your reporting. Whether it’s tracking pageviews, user behavior, or conversion rates, this integration makes it easy to analyze key metrics and visualize them in a way that aligns with your business needs.
- Familiar environment: All your data in the same Power BI APP or workspace.
- Easy information sharing: Share the dashboard with others in your tenant.
- User experience: Create a design that is tailored to your and the audience’s needs.
- Visualization: Present your data in a way that truly works for you.
Which information to show - A personal example
Before designing a dashboard, think about what you want to achieve first. For instance, in my case, I want to gain insights into the number of users on my page, their engagement rate, and their average time on the website. I do not use ads or campaigns, so I do not need any data about them.
In this article, I will explain and show my choices for designing my Google Analytics dashboard in Power BI.
Which Google Analytics KPIs to use?
Knowing what action you want to take and which goals you want to achieve helps you choose the KPIs for a dashboard. A key performance indicator that works for one does not necessarily need to work for someone else.
I want to improve the engagement rate of my website. An engaged session is a session that lasts at least 10 seconds or has a conversion event or at least 2 page views. Knowing the monthly engagement rate helps me see if I provide the right content to achieve the goal; therefore, it’s one of my KPIs.
Also, I care for the average time on my website. For example, 10,000 users a month sounds great, but if they leave the website after 3 seconds, it often means that the content is not as expected.
Insights into post performance
When considering what additional information I would like to see next to the KPIs, the performance of the posted articles pops up.
It is not just about the number of users who view an article but also the average duration spent on the page. Since the duration spent on a page indicates whether the article is being read. A low duration on the page may indicate that the content is not meeting the user’s expectations.
In this example, I combine a filter pane with the quarters next to the top 5; this way, I can easily switch right on the visual.
User source & distribution
The Google Analytics user source is important to me and therefore I want to see this in my dashboard. I post all my articles on LinkedIn, and I want to see if this impacts the views on the website.
In the visual, I decided to show the difference in the number of users compared to the last quarter as a data label. Investing into improving the SEO, I expect the number of users from the search engine to increase.
Also, I am interested in the most “popular” day on the website. As many of my users come from LinkedIn, I expect the days correlate with the days I post on LinkedIn.
User location
The purpose of my website is to share knowledge and also to provide information for possible customers. My business is located in the Netherlands and I translated my page into Dutch to make it more accessible. To see if I get more users from the Netherlands I added a map giving insights into the user distribution.
Also, I think it is, really awesome to see how this develops as my business develops!
As mentioned before, the connector for Google Analytics is available in Power BI. Knowing which decisions and actions you want to take is important for creating a Google Analytics dashboard in Power BI.