5 benefits of integrating Google Analytics with Tableau

Do you have a website? Then you’re probably using Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a powerful tool that automatically collects data about your website visitors’ behavior. It shows you how many visitors your site has had, how they arrived on your site, how many pages they viewed, how long they stayed on a specific page, and where they exited your site. Google Analytics translates this vast amount of data into dashboards, charts, and reports. Online marketers, SEO specialists, and content marketers use these insights to improve website visibility and usability and optimize conversions.

The Limits of Google Analytics

While Google Analytics provides valuable data, marketers sometimes encounter the tool’s limitations. Reporting capabilities, in particular, can be a bottleneck. It’s relatively easy to generate a report if you have access to the tool and know where to click. For many marketers, this is routine, but it becomes challenging when a manager, CEO, or executive needs specific information. They must rely on the marketer to manually copy the data into a spreadsheet or email. This process is time-consuming, prone to errors, and inefficient.

Why Should I Connect Google Analytics to Tableau?

By integrating Google Analytics with Tableau, you can leverage Tableau’s advanced reporting and dashboard capabilities. Tableau allows you to create reports tailored to the needs of different users. A CEO, for instance, looks for different information than a sales manager. With a dashboard designed for a specific department or role, users can immediately access the insights they need.

With Tableau, you can:

• Easily share results and dashboards, for example, via Slack
• Compare and combine data
• Enrich Google Analytics data with information from other systems, such as CRM, marketing automation, ERP, and other databases

Google Analytics Tableau Integration

Using a Google Analytics Tableau integration doesn’t mean you’ll replace Google Analytics entirely. Google Analytics remains an excellent tool for quick ad-hoc reporting and uncovering new insights. It’s also handy for diving directly into the data to investigate specific issues.

For example, we noticed through Google Analytics that mobile visitors were spending less time on our site. This insight led to graphical adjustments, which helped reverse the trend. Google Analytics provides actionable insights that can have an immediate impact on your website’s performance.

The power of Google Analytics:

• Quick ad-hoc reporting
• Real-time data visualization
• Discovering new insights
• Analyzing the performance of individual page

The power of Tableau:

• Creating flexible reports
• Conducting in-depth analyses
• Combining data from multiple sources
• Developing unique dashboards for different users

Conclusion: Tableau offers flexibility

At Cadran we use Tableau for our own marketing reports. In the past, we would copy the data from Google Analytics into a spreadsheet at the end of the month, so that it could be shared with certain people within the organisation. Because we now import the data into Tableau, we enjoy these 5 flexible reporting possibilities:

• We can easily share results with individuals or departments
• We have much more insight into developments and trends in our Google Analytics data
• The most important KPIs are shown on a single dashboard instead of multiple separate reports
• We have a much better grip on the return on investment (ROI) of our marketing campaigns
• Tableau is a flexible (self-service) BI-tool for everyone in the organisation (and not only IT employees or the Marketing Manager)