Do you have a website? Then you are probably using Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a powerful tool that automatically collects data about the behaviour of your website visitors. You can see for example how many visitors have visited your website at a certain moment, through which source they got to your website, how many pages they visited, how much time they spent on a certain page and on which page they left your website again. Google Analytics translates this enormous data set into useful dashboards, graphs and overviews. Online marketers, SEO specialists and content marketers use these insights to make changes to their website in order to make it easier to find, more user-friendly, and to optimise the amount of conversions.
Although Google Analytics provides you with a lot of data, online marketers regularly reach the limits of the tool. The limitations mainly lie in the reporting possibilities. Generating a report is fairly simple, provided you have access to applications and know exactly where to click. Most online marketers know the tool, and conjure up the right data easily. The result is that when a manager, CEO or executive wants to know results of a certain campaign or a certain time period, he or she always has to go to the online marketer. Who, in turn, has to copy the data from Google Analytics into a spreadsheet or e-mail. This process is time consuming, prone to errors and could be done much easier.
You can link your Google Analytics data with Tableau. By setting up a connection between Tableau and Google Analytics, you will have access to all the reporting and dashboard capabilities of Tableau. With Tableau you create clear reports for specific users. A CEO is, for instance, naturally looking for different information than a sales manager. By creating a dashboard and assigning it to a specific person or department, you can create clear reports that immediately provide the right insights for the right person. With Tableau you can:
Of course, this does not mean that you do not use Google Analytics at all. The benefit of Google Analytics is that you can create ad-hoc reports very quickly. Google Analytics also contains so much data that you can easily search for new insights. And when you encounter a problem, it is wise to dive straight into the Google Analytics data. For example, by analysing our Google Analytics data, we discovered that the average time spent by people visiting our website via a smartphone has recently started to decrease. This caused us to make certain changes. Analyses in Google often lead to new insights, which teach you how to optimise your website.
We therefore recommend using Google Analytics in combination with Tableau. These tools complement each other tremendously when used together, generating valuable insights for your business.
The power of Google Analytics:
The power of Tableau:
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:
Want to know more?
Wondering how you can link Google Analytics to Tableau? Or do you just want to discuss the benefits for your organisation? Get in touch with us to plan a demo, or download the free trial yourself!
Pieter Jan is Marketing Manager at Cadran Consultancy and Cadran Analytics.
