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Visualize Your Google Ads Data In Power BI Easily

Consolidate your data from Google Ads (Free Data Source) easily in a fully automated and secure manner without writing any code in real-time using Hevo and visualize it in Power BI.

Connect Google Ads to Power BI: 2 Easy Methods

• July 22nd, 2020

Google Ads to Power BI

Businesses aim at profitability by staying relevant in the market with the help of compelling advertisements on the digital platform. Being able to attract a large number of online users gives organizations a competitive edge over their fierce competitors. Business intelligence plays a key role in this and empowers professionals with data-backed insights to formulate strategies and set targets that can help their business reach new heights.

This article aims at teaching you how to connect Google Ads to Power BI, a powerful business intelligence tool, to analyze, visualize, and generate informative business reports, that will give a significant input in various business decisions.

Table of Contents

Introduction to Google Ads

Google Ads Logo.
Image Source: www.kindpng.com/imgv

Google Ads is an online advertisement platform developed by Google, where paid and non-paid advertisements are displayed. These advertisements can range from texts, service offerings, video content, product listings, etc., and are found in results of search engines like Google Search and non-search websites, mobile apps, and videos known as the Google Display Network.

Being relevant online when managing a business on the web can go a long way in promoting your business, thereby increasing profit. Google Search results are highly competitive, especially when you are competing against big corporations with huge marketing budgets. Having your ad displayed on the first page of search results provides a competitive advantage.

Google Ads allows you to display your ads on its search engine using keywords that are most likely to be used by visitors when searching for your product. It also allows you to set budget caps and optimize your ads for your target audience. Below is a sample of the Google Ads dashboard.

Google Ads to Power BI: Dashboard
Image Source: www.searchenginewatch.com

For further information on Google Ads, you can check the official website here.

Introduction to Power BI

Image Source: www.en.inviso.dk/events

Power BI is a cloud-based business intelligence tool used to analyze and visualize data in real-time. It converts data from multiple sources into interactive dashboards and reports, managing your business needs. Power BI consists of various formats namely, Power BI Desktop, an online Software as a Service (SaaS) called Power BI Service, and a range of mobile apps for Windows, iOS, and Android devices. It also has Power BI Report Server which allows you to publish Power BI reports to an on-premises report server, after creating them in Power BI Desktop.

These tools enable you to analyze your data and in turn, helps businesses and organizations to ask the right questions and get appropriate insights. Power BI takes data from different sources and turns it into custom visuals designed to not only help you understand the information derived from it but also get a clear idea of actions to be taken.

Power BI Dashboard
Image Source: www.insightwhale.com

For further information on Power BI, you can check the official website here.

Simplify your data analysis with Hevo’s No-code Data Pipelines

Hevo Data, a No-code Data Pipeline helps to transfer data from Google Ads (Free Data Source) and 100+ sources to your desired data warehouse and visualize it in Power BI. Hevo is fully-managed and completely automates the process of not only exporting data from your desired source but also enriching the data and transforming it into an analysis-ready form without having to write a single line of code. Its fault-tolerant architecture ensures that the data is handled in a secure, consistent manner with zero data loss.

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It provides a consistent & reliable solution to manage data in real-time and always have analysis-ready data in your desired destination. It allows you to focus on key business needs and perform insightful analysis using BI tools such as Power BI and many more. 

Check out some amazing features of Hevo:

  • Completely Managed Platform: Hevo is fully managed. You need not invest time and effort to maintain or monitor the infrastructure involved in executing codes.
  • Live Monitoring: Hevo allows you to monitor the data flow and check where your data is at a particular point in time.
  • Data Transformation: It provides a simple interface to perfect, modify, and enrich the data you want to export. 
  • Secure: Hevo has a fault-tolerant architecture that ensures that the data is handled in a secure, consistent manner with zero data loss.
  • Schema Management: Hevo takes away the tedious task of schema management & automatically detects schema of incoming data and maps it to the destination schema.
  • Minimal Learning: Hevo with its simple and interactive UI, is extremely simple for new customers to work on and perform operations.
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Prerequisites

  • Working knowledge of Power BI.
  • Working knowledge of Google Ads.
  • Power BI installed on the host workstation.
  • A Google Ads account.
  • A Power BI account.

Why integrate data from Google Ads to Power BI?

Having information about your advertising, performance rating for Ads and your pay per click (PPC) numbers are great for a start, however, it is vital to use this information to improve your decision making and help in predicting future occurrences based on noticeable trends. Understanding your advertising efforts and how they affect other functions in your company, boosts growth and gives a better understanding of your target customers.

By connecting Google Ads to Power BI, you can extract details related to the performance of advertisements, number of impressions and clicks, and modify your adverts to improve product engagement.

Download the Guide on How to Set Up a Data Analytics Stack
Download the Guide on How to Set Up a Data Analytics Stack
Download the Guide on How to Set Up a Data Analytics Stack
Learn how to build a self-service data analytics stack for your use case.

Methods to connect Google Ads to Power BI

There are multiple methods that can be used to connect Google Ads to Power BI:

Method 1: Using the Google Analytics connector to connect with Power BI

Google Analytics is a web analytics service that provides users with statistical and analytical information. It is highly useful & helps in managing search engine optimization (SEO) and product marketing operations. It is free of cost service available to every Google user.

To integrate data with Google Analytics, you can use the following steps:

Step 1: Signing in to Google Analytics

Go to the official Google Analytics site and sign in using your Google Account. Once you have signed in, you will reach the home page. Now from the column on the left, click on the admin option.

Google Analytics Home Page
Image Source: Self

Step 2: Configuring the data source

Select Google Ads linking option found in the properties column. To add a new account, click on the + new link group button and select the Google account you want to link with Google Analytics. Click on continue and provide a unique name for your group.

Google Ads Linking
Image Source: Self

Turn the linking option on for all properties for which you want the Google Ads data to be loaded. You can even enable Google Display Impression Reporting to include that data for each view.

Click on connect to let the linking process enable auto-tagging for your Google Ads account automatically. If you want to manually select tags for your account, you can go to the advanced settings option and click on the “leave my auto-tagging settings as they are” option.

Step 3: Loading data to Power BI

Launch Power BI Desktop on your system. Navigate to the home ribbon bar and select the get data option. This will open the get data dialogue box.

Power BI Home
Image Source: www.docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi

Now from the panel, select the online services option. This displays a list of services from where you can bring in your data.

Power BI Online Services
Image Source: www.docs.microsoft.com/en-us

Select the Google Analytics option from the list. Once you have selected it, click on connect to start the connection process. Carry out the steps mentioned in the documentation.

Power BI Online Services: Google Analytics
Image Source: www.docs.microsoft.com/en-us

This is how you integrate data to Google Analytics and connect Google Ads to Power BI.

Method 2: Using the Google BigQuery connector to connect with Power BI

BigQuery is Google Cloud Platform’s enterprise data warehouse for analytics. BigQuery performs exceptionally even while analyzing huge amounts of data & quickly meets your Big Data processing requirements with offerings such as exabyte-scale storage and petabyte-scale SQL queries. It is a serverless Software as a Service (SaaS) application that supports querying using ANSI SQL & houses machine learning capabilities.

To integrate data with Google BigQuery, you can use the following steps:

Step 1: Configuring Google BigQuery

Create a new Google Cloud project using the console and enable the BigQuery API and billing process for your project.

To set-up, a temporary data set, open the Google Cloud BigQuery console and select the project you have created. Click on create a new dataset option.

Google BigQuery Console
Image Source: www.docs.looker.com/setup-and-management

A new dialogue box will now open up, where you need to provide the dataset ID and location.

Google BigQuery: Create dataset
Image Source: www.docs.looker.com/setup-and-management

Step 2: Configuring the data source

Ensure that you have admin access to update and transfer data. Enable BigQuery Data Transfer service from the web UI and click on the data transfer button. A new dialogue box will now open up, representing options from where you can choose your desired data source. Select Google Ads.

Using BigQuery’s data connector, you can set up time windows to refresh your data, with a maximum limit of 30 days. Schedule your data export as per requirement and enter your Google Ads customer ID or manager account details to connect and export your data.

Allow read access for your Google Ads ID to successfully configure transfer settings.

Step 3: Loading data to Power BI

Launch Power BI Desktop on your system. Navigate to the home ribbon bar and select the get data option. This will open the get data dialogue box.

Power BI home
Image Source: www.docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi

Now from the panel, select the database option. This displays a list of databases from where you can bring in your data.

Select the Google BigQuery option from the list. Once you have selected it, click on connect to start the connection process. Carry out the steps mentioned in the documentation.

This is how you integrate data to Google BigQuery and connect Google Ads to Power BI.

Using Power BI to analyze data

To create efficient reports and visualizations in Power BI, you need to know about the data analysis expression (DAX) language which is the native query language for Microsoft PowerPivot, Power BI Desktop, and SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) tabular models. It includes functions used in Excel with additional functionalities, that are designed to work with relational data and perform dynamic aggregation. You can learn more about DAX for BI from the official documentation here.

In Power BI, each table you connect with is known as a dataset and is available in the data view. Altering these datasets can help you create a report. These reports are then available in the report view. Views enable you to create visualizations, filter entries, format texts, and perform analytics such as adding charts, bars, graphs, lines, etc. to the report.

Power BI Documentation
Image Source: www.cdata.com/kb/tech

Power BI lets you share reports with others within your organization by publishing them. For further information about Power BI features, you can check the Power BI documentation.

Develop scripts that can identify incremental updates happening in your data, such as clicks and impressions. This allows loading data in real-time and enabling additional updates in Google Ads. Use fields that auto-increment to give your script the ability to recognize new data. You can then set your script on a continuous loop to keep refreshing data.

Conclusion

This article introduces you to the various methods that can be used to connect Google Ads to Power BI. It also provides in-depth knowledge about the concepts behind every step to help you understand and implement them efficiently. These methods, however, can be challenging especially for a beginner & this is where Hevo saves the day. Hevo Data, a No-code Data Pipeline helps you transfer data from Google Ads (Free Data Source) in a fully automated and secure manner without having to write the code repeatedly. Hevo with its strong integration with 100+ sources & BI tools, allows you to not only export & load data but also transform & enrich your data & make it analysis-ready in a jiffy.

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Tell us about your preferred way to connect Google Ads to Power BI! Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.

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