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:
- Power BI web: This is the web version of Power Bi (www.powerbi.com)
- Power BI Desktop: This is the software we will use here (a standalone free version of Power BI)
- Power BI Office 365: This version is an add-on for your office 365 license
- 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.
