Need ideas for new posts? Let your Visitors, Google Analytics and Power BI help you!

[ruthpozuelo]

If you are like me, you have probably stared at a white page wondering what your next topic should be on your blog or what additional content could be relevant for my site. I have written about the everything, what else could be said?

With our new dashboard, you will get help from your site visitors to get ideas on new topics.To be able to recreate this dashboard you need to configure site search in your site.

Don’t, worry it is very easy to do.

What insights can we get with this dashboard?

As we normally do, let’s start with the results first:

 

In this dashboard you will be able to understand:

• Find ideas for new content
• Find new topics that your readers would be interested in
• Understand if your blog is driving the right users to your site
• Are your important pages hidden from your readers?
• What is your audience looking for in your site
• Publish your content on the most relevant places on your site.

Watch it on 

If you would like to see a live version of the dashboard, you can watch it in our YouTube Channel, but if you prefer text, continue reading.

Don't want to create the Power BI file? 

If you are a member on our site (it's free), you can download it by following this link. You will also get an indepth guide on how to use the dashboard.

You will need also to change the data source from my account to your Google account.

Creating the dashboard: Get Data

Before you can start creating this dashboard you need to have Power BI Desktop installed (it’s FREE) and connect to Google Analytics. Once you have done that, we can start importing the data in Power BI.

Let’s do it, open Power Bi Desktop and click on “Get Data”:

Select Google Analytics and click “Connect”:

Select your account, property, and view:

From the Internal Search folder select:

• Date,
• Search Term
• Total Unique Searches,
• Start Page,
• Month of Year

Rename the table “Internal Search” and click “Close and apply”.

Building the Dashboard

Now that we have all the data we need, lets start building the dashboard.

In this dashboard we don’t need to create any formulas at all, but I always create my own measures for sum, so this is the only formula we will need.

If you don’t want to create the measure, simply use Total Unique Searches instead of the new measure.

Formulas

Searches = SUM('Internal Search'[Total Unique Searches])

I think it is quite impressive that with so little data and so little work, we can gain so much knowledge about our visitors and site.

Create the visualizations

The visializations are quite straight forward:

Here is the Date visualization, built with Month Of Year and Searches.

The Search Term visualization, built with Search Term, Searches:

And the Start Page Visualization, built with Search Term, Start Page and Searches:

If you have doubts on how to interprete these visualizations, jump to our dashboard guide.

Custom visualizations

To build the Search Term cloud,  I am using a custom visualization called world cloud that you need to download from Power Bi custom Gallery if you want to use it.

Click on the three dots to import it:

Build the visualization with Search Term only so it counts the frequency of the words. Turn on “break off words” and turn on “Stop words” for optimal use. (Remember, for a more indepth explanation, check out our dashboard guide.)

Now its your turn, what gold is your site search hiding?

Let me know if you build the dashboard or if you are having problems building it.