Power Analytics with Power BI and Google Analytics

Power BI is my favourite BI and visualization tool as it is very simple yet powerful. It doesn’t only support traditional data sources like databases, CSV, JSON, XML and etc., but also supports emerging sources that are available in HDFS, Spark, R, Salesforce, Google Analytics and cloud platforms and etc. It is extremely easy for users that are only familiar with tools like Excel. It has desktop, mobile and online service versions. The desktop version is free to everyone.

Google Analytics provides hundreds of measures and dimensions you can use to create insightful dashboards. Google already provides a number of reports and dashboards that you can customize in the website. However it could not connect to your website databases or other data sources. When combing your own data with Google Analytics data, you can generate even deeper insights.

In this series, I’m going to show you how to create powerful dashboard using Power BI. The data are sourced from Google Analytics and the backend SQL Azure database of this website.

Sample dashboard

Eventually, you will be able to generate a similar dashboard like the following screenshot:

* The above charts are just some demos which you can do quickly with Power BI but it doesn't mean they are the best practices. It only took me a couple hours to create the above live dashboard.

* The dashboard can be deployed into Power BI service where you can configure automatic refresh.

* The dashboard is highly interactive as it provides slicers and drill-through functionalities.

Download and install Power BI

Download Power BI desktop from the following website:

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/

You can also use Power BI Service if you have an account available to use.

Outline

I will continuously update this page when the new tutorial is ready.

Power BI Analytics - Connect to DBMS and Card

Follow this page to setup DBMS connections and to create a Card visualization:

Power BI Analytics - Connect to DBMS and Card

Power BI Analytics - Line Chart and Running Total (Quick Measures)

To be added.  Stay tuned.

Power BI Analytics - Clustered Bar chart and drill-through

To be added. Stay tuned.

Power BI Analytics - Treemap

To be added. Stay tuned.

Power BI Analytics - Line and Column Chart

To be added. Stay tuned.

Power BI Analytics - Filled map

To be added. Stay tuned.

Power BI Analytics - Donut chart

To be added. Stay tuned.

Power BI Analytics - Gauge

To be added. Stay tuned.

Power BI Analytics - Stacked bar chart

To be added. Stay tuned.

Power BI Analytics - Table

To be added. Stay tuned.

Power BI Analytics - KPI

To be added. Stay tuned.

Power BI Analytics - Slicers

To be added. Stay tuned.

Power BI Analytics - Data Models

To be added. Stay tuned.

Power BI Analytics - Summary and others

To be added. Stay tuned.