SharePoint Consulting Blog

Power BI is a great business analytics service provided by Microsoft. It provides wide range of interactive visualizations with self-service business intelligence capabilities for analytical reports and dashboard development. Now, for analytical reports and dashboard development, source of data is very important. Power BI is flexible enough to consume data from variety of data sources.

We can also develop Power BI Reports & Dashboard using Google Analytics as the source of data.

Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. So it helps us to analyze the web traffic in more effective manners if we have BI reports available for Google Analytics data. Here, I'll walkthrough in detail how to create a Power BI report consuming Google Analytics as data source.

This report will be developed in Power BI Desktop. First, we need to connect to data source in Power BI Desktop.

Connect to Data Source (Google Analytics):

1. Open Power BI Desktop, and click “Get Data”:

2. Select “Online Services” -> "Google Analytics" as data source and click “Connect”:

3. Continue to connect to a third-party service:

4. Click "Sign In" to login to your Google Analytics account:

5. Enter your Google Account credentials:

6. Allow Power BI to access Google Analytics data:

7. Now we are logged in to Google Analytics account. Just click "Connect" to consume Google Analytics data:

So, now Google Analytics data is loaded to Power BI Desktop. We can consume the data to develop the report as per our requirements.

Develop the Power BI Report (Google Analytics):

For this example, we will develop the report that will help us to visualize the users visited the web site from different locations.

1. From available data, load -

Users from "User" section.
City, Region and Country from "Geo Network" section.

2. Select a Map from Visualizations and configure as shown in below image so that we will be able to see users from different locations on map with Country -> Region -> City drill-down capabilities in Power BI:

3. Now, we have configured the visual and report will appear as shown in below image. Report also provides us information on no. of users from different countries.

4. Enable the Drill-Down capabilities and that will allow us to drill-down to any Country -> Region -> City.:

4. So we get the user visits data for specific country. User can click any specific region from country to further drill down to region level to see city specific website visit information:

So, it becomes easier and helpful to analyze the website visits in geographic manner.

Publish the Report (Google Analytics):

We can publish the developed report to web. To publish the report to web, we must have Power BI account. If you don’t have account, you can sign-up here.

1. Click “Publish” in ribbon bar and sign in as your account in Power BI Desktop:

2. Enter your credentials and click “Sign In”:

3. Select “My workspace” as destination to publish the report.

4. So, report is published to Power BI web. Please click the provided link to open the report on web.