Use Supermetrics for Power BI to connect to over 100 different data sources and create visualizations, and share your reports with your colleagues. The Supermetrics blog has plenty of articles about Power BI and its advantages.
What is Power BI?
Power BI is a business intelligence tool where you can connect and visualize multiple data sets and create interactive online reports. A report in Power BI contains data pulled from different data sources and filtered to visualize the data needed for the report, such as campaign data for the last month.
Compared with Excel, Power BI can increase your analytical and reporting capabilities beyond tables and numbers, making it easier to generate insights about what's happening. With just a couple of clicks, you can share and export these reports to all of your colleagues. Learn more about Power BI on Microsoft's website.
For detailed information and instructions on how to use Power BI, Microsoft's documentation about Power BI is the best resource.
How Supermetrics works in Power BI
When you're using Supermetrics in Power BI, you first need to go to the Supermetrics Hub to define what data to pull. Then, you'll take that data to Power BI using our connector and refine the data further to create your report.
Step 1: Prepare your data on the Supermetrics Hub
When pulling data using Supermetrics, you have to create a query, which is a data set in Power BI. In a query, you define the following things:
- What data source is used
- What metrics are pulled — such as impressions, site visitors, or money spent
- What dimensions are used — such as campaign name, date, or country
- What date range is used — such as last week, the time between March 1 and May 13, or the last 12 months
The connection to the data source, as well as the query, are created on the Supermetrics Hub, where we have a dedicated query manager for Power BI. Take a look at how to connect to data sources and create queries for Power BI.
Step 2: Connect to your data from Power BI
Once you've connected to a data source and set up the query on the Supermetrics Hub, bring the data to Power BI using the Supermetrics connector.
Follow these instructions to find the Supermetrics connector and load your data to Power BI.
Step 3: Work with the data in Power BI
Visualize and customize the data
After loading the data into your Power BI report, you can start building visualizations on top of it. Each visualization can use a combination of metrics, dimensions, filters and settings based on the loaded data.
For example, you can create one chart for campaign data, a different chart for site visitors, and another chart for audience demographic data. Our support article about customizing data gives you more tips on how to do this in practice.
To add completely new dimensions or metrics to your query, make the changes to the query on the Supermetrics Hub. After that, just click Refresh in Power BI to get the new data.
Schedule a report refresh and share the report
You can easily share your report with others and schedule a refresh so that the report updates automatically at regular intervals. Before sharing or setting up scheduled refreshes, you need to publish your report.
Tips and tricks
Templates for easy setup
To get started quickly, use our ready-made data visualization templates for Power BI. All you need to do is connect to a data source on the Supermetrics Hub, download the template, and import the template to Power BI. You can find instructions for the templates in our support article.
Get all data at once
To build efficient reports in Power BI, make sure that the query you want to use across your report has all the necessary metrics and dimensions. Depending on your use case, you may need just a couple metrics and dimensions, or alternatively, you can have a bigger set of data to work on and build many visualizations from that data.
Note that some data sources limit the amount of data you can pull at once, so in case your queries get too heavy, you may experience slowness in loading the data or error messages. Learn more about daily request quotas and limits.
Data blending
Data blending in Supermetrics allows you to — as the name suggests — blend data from multiple data sources in the same query or data set. All your advertising cost data from different platforms in one query? No problem!
If you're using data blending, it's better to keep things simple and create individual queries per use case. In practice, don't include all possible metrics and dimensions in the blend, but focus on what you actually need for the particular use case. It's best to create just one query per graphic to avoid things getting too complicated.
You can also transform data in Power BI using the features in the Power Query Editor. This is especially useful if you already have some data available in Power BI. To access Power BI's data transformation features, click Transform data in the Home tab's tool ribbon. Take a look at Microsoft's tutorial about shaping and combining data in Power BI