How to View your Website Stats in Tableau

DataRemixed.com turns 2 today(!), so I’m giving my website a little more breathing room by increasing the overall width of the site. Now I’ll be able to publish wider visualizations and interactive dashboards, which should hopefully result in better overall quality. By all means, hold me to it!

Last year, when DataRemixed turned one, I published 4 DataViz Blogging Lessons Learned. I re-read it today and I still stand by those words a year later. If anything, I’d add a 5th lesson – “Add your unique perspective”. Charles Joseph Mindard was a civil engineer and built canals and railroads. Is it any wonder that he made great flow maps after his engineering career was over? Flow maps were part of his DNA by that point. What is your unique perspective, and how does it inform your best work?

This year, I’m taking a look back at the usage of this site in its second full year of existence. Using Tableau Desktop’s Google Analytics connector, I pulled in data about my website and created this interactive dashboard, which I’m happy to share with the world:

What are my key take-aways from this dashboard?

Be Helpful. Look at the top 6 destinations. 4 start with the two simple words “How to”. It’s as simple as that. Think about SEO. Google is the #1 source of traffic for my website. What does it look like to a search engine? Data Viz is global. My site is a very small corner of the world wide web, but visitors from 155 countries stopped by. Incredible

Taking #1 above seriously, let me show you how I created this dashboard. Chances are you care about your website stats more than you care about mine, so the next section includes a detailed dashboard walk-through so you can do the same. You’ll need Tableau Desktop. If you don’t already have it, you can get a 14 day trial here. If you’re a student or a member of IRE, you can get it for free. You can also open and explore my workbook if you want by clicking on “Download” in the bottom right corner and opening the .twbx file in Tableau.

Here goes.

How did I make it?

This slideshare document walks you through the steps I took to build this interactive web traffic dashboard. Click to the right of the slides to advance them one by one:

I hope this was a helpful tutorial, and please let me know if anything was unclear, or if you have any suggestions to make this dashboard even better.

Thanks for stopping by,

Ben