Connect Google Analytics to Power BI Desktop

Quick tutorial for connecting you google analytics data to Microsoft Power BI Desktop.

Google analytics is a versatile and free tool to make the most out of your web data. Although many people may be satisfied with the level of insight you can achieve with the in-browser analytics and visualizations software on the Google Analytics webpage, a lot of you may like to take the data into your own hands and dive in with a dedicated BI tool. For this tutorial I’ll be using Microsoft’s Power BI desktop application, but this method should apply to other similar software such as Tableau Desktop.

If you’ve connected Power BI to a data source before then connecting to Google Analytics will be a pretty straightforward process. Like any other source, click on“Get data” and from the drop down menu select “more…”. This will open a window for the full menu of connectors. Select “Google Analytics” and click “Connect”.

You may be prompted to sign in to your Google account if you haven’t already. Make sure it’s the same Google account as the one you have your analytics set up on! You may be prompted for permissions then be taken back to the previous connection window when finished.

Now you have connected to your Google Analytics account and from here you can choose the parameters you’d like to use to load the data into your Power BI workspace. There are some limitations such as restrictions on dimension/metric value for a single request and automatically having data sampled for high traffic websites. Most people won’t run into these limits and I wouldn’t worry about them unless you know the website you want to analyze has substantially high traffic.

I hope you enjoyed the article and were able to learn something new about data visualization and analytics software.