Tableau provides the direct connect to Google Analytics. Simply log in with your Google account and you can connect to Data in Google Analytics. The great thing about Tableau is that you can also combine your Google Analytics data with other data sources such as Salesforce.com, spreadsheet, databases, Splunk, Teradata, Hadoop, BigQuery and more.
Below are some sample dashboards I built using the Google Analytics data for this site.
Tableau Google Analytics Dashboard – Web Dashboard
The highlight of this dashboard is the Daily Visits. I combined Google Analytics data with a spreadsheet. In the spreadsheet, I have some activities I did to promote my site. If you take a look at one of the dates when the traffic spikes (eg, July 11), you can see the activity I did to promote my site on that day. This is a great example to combine Google Analytics data with other data sources to see what really drives the traffic to your site.
Tableau Google Analytics Dashboard – Visitors Dashboard
Tableau Google Analytics Dashboard – Exit Dashboard
Note: The data source is the Google Analytics Data of my personal website http://jennyxiaozhang.com/.
I am welcome any questions and suggestions. I am looking forward to hearing from your experience of using Google Analytics data in Tableau to do web analysis.