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Identify and Remove referrer spam from Google Analytics using Power BI

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There are a lot of blog posts aiding people to get rid of referrer spam in Google Analytics and although they are effective, the spammers are usually one step ahead of you, and spam will find its way in your data.

How serious is the problem?

It varies depending if you have a lot or a little traffic and whether spammers are targeting your site or if it is a random attack.

I wanted to find out how serious the problem was for some of the sites I manage, and here is what I found out using our growth dashboard:

Before removing the spam:

before spam filter

After removing Spam:

after spam filter

So, for this site 1% of the monthly growth is caused by spam…Not good right?

Ok, so how did I do that?  Lets go through the steps and the new dashboard.

[Read more…]

The ”Bill Gates Effect” in Google Analytics and how to get rid of it with Power BI

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Did you know that when Bill Gates enters a bar, the average customer becomes a billionaire? That is what I call the Bill Gates Effect. (Many thanks to Introductory Statistics)

Pss! There is a Power BI dashboard at the end of the blog post, don’t miss it!

The Bill Gates Effect Explained

A business owner is trying to understand the average income of the clients in the bar next door so he hires a student to interview the customers.

When the student had finished the interviews and the analysis, the person with the highest income leaves the bar and Bill Gates comes in. Frustrated, he re-runs the analysis this time with Bill Gates data instead.

The student comes back to the business owner and reports that the average customer in the next door bar is a billionaire!!

Average income= $ 7 900 042 500

The business owner ask the student to show the calculations and after reviewing the data understands the ”mistake”.

[Read more…]

Need ideas for new content for your site? Let your Visitors, Google Analytics and Power BI help you!

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If you are like me, you have probably stared at a white page wondering what your next topic should be on your blog. You have written about everything, what else could be said?

With our new dashboard, you will get help from your site visitors to get ideas on new topics. For creating this you need to have site search set up in your site.

Don’t, worry it is very easy to do.

What insights can we get with this dashboard?

[Read more…]

How engaging is your website content? Discover it with Power BI and Google Analytics

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Measuring content engagement is probably one of the most common actions performed by website owners.

There are a lot of indicators that can help you understand how engaged your readers are with your content, but I will show in this post, the power BI dashboard with the ones I use the most: scroll tracking and content grouping.

Engagement dashboard power bi google analytics1

To be able to  to build this website you need to: [Read more…]

Reuse a Power BI file (change source path files)

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If you want to reuse a power bi file you downloaded form Curbal.com, here are the steps to make it your own, depending on the source you have used.

Watch it on YouTube

If you prefer, you can watch our demo in YouTube, otherwise you can follow a step by step guide below. Let’s start.

Reuse a power bi file youtube

Access source file in Power BI

Download the Power BI file and open it.

When you open the file, you will see a yellow ribbon letting you know that you have pending changes. Ignore it, it is only trying to refresh the sources.

error message power bi

[Read more…]

Which pages are under-performing on my site? Find out using Google Analytics and Power BI (supercharged Excel).

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Most businesses nowadays run blogs on their websites to attract customers that are searching for related information.  Do you know how your blog pages are performing against your business pages?

In this post, I am going to show you how to categorize your content based on your Blog Pages and your Business Pages. I will add a third category as this site has also a Google Analytics Glossary, and I want to understand how that is performing against the other pages/categories.

Categorize your content dashboard power bi google analytics1

Why not do it in Google Analytics?

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The ultimate dashboard to track your website growth with Google Analytics and Power BI (supercharged Excel)

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I have been using Google Analytics for a few years now and it has been really useful to modify my websites so they are more useful to my readers.

So, all my efforts modifying my sites, are they paying off? Do I get new readers? Is my site growing?

Google Analytics helps you with the technical details, (screen size, speed, etc) with the behavioral details (pageviews, time on page, etc) and even with your traffic sources (social, organic, etc). Everything is geared so you can grow your site, but to see how much growth you are getting on a daily/ weekly/monthly or year basis, you need to do it manually.

I want to find out in one single click, how much my sites are growing,  and I can finally do it using Power BI. My site growth in one click. Excellent! I will show you what you will create, so you can decide right now if this for you or not already now.

Growth Dashboard power bi google analytics

Here is the dashboard (see picture below):

  • The  column to the left represents the actual number of sessions this year, month, week  up to yesterday’s date, yesterday and today’s date
  • The middle column represents the number of sessions last year at the exact same Week Day. For example, if today is 2015-12-02, this column will give the number of sessions up to 2014-12-01 (the day before)
  • The column to the right represents the growth in percent.

NOTE: Why I am using Yesterday’s date instead of Today’s? Check the end of the post for the answer.

What insights can I get from the dashboard?

[Read more…]

Export Google Analytics data to Microsoft Power BI (supercharged Excel)

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If you need more control of your data and you always wanted to download it to Excel, you can now do that with Microsoft’s supercharged Excel program: Power BI Desktop.

I will guide you through the initial steps to get Google Analytics data into Power BI and on future posts we will create useful reports with the data and Power BI.

A few words about Power BI

Before we start, and in an attempt to avoid confusion later on, there are more than one Power BI out there and you need to know which one to choose:

  1. Power BI web: This is the web version of Power Bi (www.powerbi.com)
  2. Power BI Desktop: This is the software we will use here (a standalone free version of Power BI)
  3. Power BI Office 365: This version is an add-on for your office 365 license
  4. Excel: yes, excel has all the Power BI functionality but they call it: Power View, Powerpivot, Power Query.

You probably wonder why I would use Power BI Desktop and not Excel, and the answer is simple: You need a 64-bits computer if you dont want Excel to crash all the time and Excel does not have the Google Analytics connector we will use in this tutorial. I am guessing that the reason they don’t have it is to get people to use Power BI Desktop and Web. Fair enough.

Watch it on YouTube

If you prefer, you can watch our demo in YouTube, otherwise you can follow a step by step guide below. Let’s start.

How to export data to google analytics Youtube

[Read more…]

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