Connect Google Analytics to Tableau

google analytics tableau

Analyze Your Metrics from Google Analytics in Tableau

Introduction

Many organizations use Google Analytics to track the success of their digital marketing efforts. While Google Analytics is a comprehensive data analytics tool, it is not the best for data visualization.

Thus, connecting Google Analytics to a powerful visualization tool like Tableau helps you understand the data better and extract hidden insights for better decisions. But how do you connect Google Analytics to Tableau?

You can implement Tableau Google Analytics connection in four easy steps – login to the Windsor.ai connector, select Google Analytics as a data source, select Tableau as a destination and copy the data connection URL, then login to Tableau and paste the copied URL into the Web Data Connector field.

This article is a Google Analytics Tableau integration guide explaining these steps in detail. At the end of the article, you’ll be able to import all your website and analytics data from Google Analytics to Tableau.

 

Introduction to Google Analytics

 

Google Analytics is a web analytics tool provided by Google. It is the most widely used web analytics tool.

If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it” is one of the most important quotes in business. That is, it is when you track and measure your progress towards a desired outcome that you can identify areas to improve.

Knowing the importance of tracking and measuring data, organizations use Google Analytics to track website traffic, conversions, and other website metrics. Google Analytics can give you a complete understanding of your customers across devices and platforms and anticipate future customer actions.

With Google Analytics, you can access a host of customer-centric measurements, helping you understand how your customers interact across your website. It offers interactive dashboards that help you visualize your data for better understanding. It provides customized reporting, allowing you to generate reports meeting your specific requirements.

 

Introduction to Tableau

Tableau is a Business Intelligence and data visualization tool. It integrates with spreadsheets and databases to generate interactive reports and dashboards.

That is, Tableau is a powerful tool that you can connect to a data source (including Google Analytics) to extract your data and then present it in a visually appealing and easy-to-understand format.

Know that the end goal of data analysis is to glean actionable insight. Tableau helps in this regard. Using Tableau, you can create visualizations with speed and ease, making it easy to understand data for faster decisions and actions.

 

Why connect Google Analytics to Tableau?

After spending money to publish content and create campaigns for your site, you would want to know whether your website reaches your target audience.

Google Analytics is the go-to tool for tracking web usage. However, the vast volume of data that Google Analytics provides can easily be overwhelming. Thus, for effective analysis, you should pull the specific Google Analytics data relevant to your goals to a separate worksheet.

More so, while Google Analytics can track the website traffic data you desire, it has limited data visualization capabilities. So, it may not present the data in a way that is easy to understand.

Since Tableau is a powerful visualization tool, connecting Google Tableau to Google Analytics helps you to import relevant web analytics data to Tableau for visualization, presenting the data in a format that is easy to understand and act on.

 

Advantages of using Tableau with Google Analytics

Connecting Google Analytics and Tableau comes with many advantages, including:

  • Blending Google Analytics data with data from other sources
  • Providing more actionable insight
  • Offering better data cleaning
  • Filtering unwanted outliers
  • Using calculated fields to create new data for more insights
  • Adding interactivity to dashboards

 

Connecting Tableau to Google Analytics allows you to blend Google Analytics data with data from other sources

Organizations use Google Analytics to track how people use their sites (like the number of users, bounce rate, etc.). However, site usage is often only one part of the story. Organizations often want to track other website metrics that Google Analytics does not allow (like the number of content by category, author, etc.).

Blending Google Analytics data with this other data that Google Analytics does not have dimensions for can give a lot more insights than you can get from either one of them. Google Analytics Tableau integration helps you do this. First, you import your data from Google Analytics and the other data source into Tableau. Then you use Tableau to create robust visualizations of the combined data.

 

Tableau Google Analytics integration provides more actionable insights

Connecting Tableau to Google Analytics will help you glean more insights from data than you can possibly get with only the web analytics tool. This is because Tableau has many advanced features that you can use to supercharge your Google Analytics data analysis.

One of the best examples is the forecasting feature of Tableau. The feature uses exponential smoothing to find a regular pattern in measures that can continue into the future.

Thus, while Google Analytics dashboards can show your site visitors, Google Analytics Tableau dashboards can go a step further to show you the number of site visitors you’re likely to have in the future.

 

Google Analytics Tableau integration helps you access features for better data cleaning

Google Analytics Tableau integration provides resources (particularly the split and group features) to fix incorrectly formatted data within a dataset.

Google Analytics data often have string fields, where data contains multiple distinct pieces of information. For example, in “device type” analysis, Google Analytics usually displays the number and percentage of devices visiting a site together like: 150 (25%), mobile: 400 (66.67%), and tablet: 50 (8.33%).

In Tableau, you can clean up such data by using the “split” feature to split the values into separate fields.

Tableau’s “group” feature also helps clean Google Analytics data. For example, if you change the URL of a page, Google Analytics will show the old URL and the new one as separate pages. The Tableau “group” feature solves this, as it allows you to select the old and new URLs and group them as one. This way, you can view one data for the page.

 

Google Analytics Tableau integration makes it easy to filter unwanted outliers in analytics data

When analyzing data, you may need to clean data by filtering out outliers (data sets that do not appear to fit within the data you are analyzing).

Tableau makes it very easy to detect and filter outliers. So, importing Google Analytics data to Tableau offers better data analysis as you can deal with outliers. In a Tableau Google Analytics dashboard, you can easily create a scatter plot to see outliers. Then you can filter out these off data sets by selecting to keep or exclude.

 

Connecting Tableau and Google Analytics helps you use calculated fields to create new data for more insights

Sometimes, you want more than Google Analytics data provides. For example, while Google Analytics data shows you the number of users and sessions, you may be more interested in users conversion rate.

Google Analytics Tableau integration helps you do this using Tableau’s “calculated field” feature. After importing your Google Analytics data to Tableau, you can select fields (columns) in the data and create a new field (essentially new data).

In the example above (of wanting conversion rate data), you can use the transaction (conversion) and users fields to create the new field using the calculation: SUM ( [Transactios] ) / SUM ( [Users] ).

You can then use the new data to create more robust visualizations (Tableau Google Analytics dashboards) for actionable insights.

 

Google Analytics Tableau integration allows adding interactivity to dashboards

Google Analytics dashboards are not as interactive as Tableau dashboards. This is because, in Tableau, you can click on a visual in a dashboard to add interactive elements.

There are five Tableau actions for adding interactivity to dashboards – filtering, highlighting, URL action, Go- to sheet, and Tableau Set action. So, Tableau Google Analytics integration gives you more interactive dashboards, making it easier and faster to glean actionable insights.

 

Connecting Google Analytics to Tableau

One of the best ways to connect Google Analytics to Tableau is using the Windsor.ai connector. With Windsor, you can connect Tableau and Google Analytics in a few simple steps:

 

Step one: Log in to Windsor account

To begin the Google Analytics Tableau integration, go to the Windsor.ai website and log in with your details.

In the Windsor.ai website, click “log in” at the top right corner of the page. Then in the “sign in” window, enter your registered email address and password. When you’re done, click the blue “Login” button.

 

Step two: Select Google Analytics as a data source

As a Tableau Google Analytics connector, you use Windsor.ai to import data from a source (Google Analytics) to a destination (Tableau). So, the next step is to select Google Analytics as the source you want to pull data from.

The different data sources from which Windsor.ai can pull data are listed on a navigation pane on the left-hand side of the page. Find and select “Google Analytics” on the list.

 

Then click “Sign in with Google” and follow the prompts. Lastly, click the “Next” button.

 

Step three: Select Tableau as a destination

On the destination window, select “Tableau” as your data destination.

 

Selecting “Tableau” as your data destination opens a window with the connector URL. Click the “Copy” button to copy this URL.

 

Step four:  Go to Tableau and open the web data connector

Go to Tableau and log in with your details. Under “Connect,” click “To A Server.” It opens a few data connections. For a complete list, select “More.”

The complete list of data connections opens up. Choose “Web Data Connector” from the list.

 

Choosing “Web Data Connector” opens up a window with a field requesting the URL of the data connector. Paste the data connection URL from Windsor into this field. Then press “Enter.”

The connector will automatically retrieve your data from Google Analytics and import it into Tableau. You can then proceed to do your analysis and create robust visualizations.

 

Conclusion

Like many people, you probably use Google Analytics to track your website usage. However, with Tableau having advanced features for data cleaning, blending, analysis, and visualization, connecting Tableau to Google Analytics helps you get the most out of your web analytics data.

An excellent Tableau Google Analytics connector is Windsor.ai.

Which  offers a seamless Tableau Google Analytics integration in four easy steps – login to the Windsor.ai connector, select Google Analytics as a data source, select Tableau as a destination and copy the data connection URL, then login to Tableau and paste the copied URL into the Web Data Connector field.

With Windsor.ai, you can connect Tableau to Google Analytics to get robust insights to optimize your marketing efforts.

 

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FAQ:

Does Tableau work with Google Analytics?

Tableau is a powerful BI tool that you can use to pull any data from any data source (including Google Analytics) for visualization. So, Tableau works with Google Analytics, helping to make the analytics easier to understand.

With the superior features of Tableau (such as blending data from different sources, data cleaning with splitting and grouping, interactive dashboard, calculated fields, and more), you can connect Google Analytics and Tableau to get more robust data analysis and dynamic dashboards. With this, you’ll get a lot more insights than with only Google Analytics.

 

Is Google Analytics better than Tableau?

The Google Analytics vs Tableau discussion is like comparing apples and oranges. Google Analytics is a web analytics tool that helps you to track and measure your site usage metrics (like site visitors, sessions, conversions, etc.). On the other hand, Tableau is a BI tool that you can connect to a data source to visualize and understand your data.

Google Analytics is the most popular web analytics tool. If you want to track how visitors interact with your website, Google Analytics is the tool to use. However, Tableau is one of the most widely used data visualization tools. If you want to create robust visualizations of your data, it is not a question of Tableau vs Google Analytics, Tableau is the tool for you.

Templates for Google Analytics and Tableau

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Google Analytics metrics and dimensions available for streaming into Tableau

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Extract Google Analytics data to Tableau with Windsor.ai

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