In my last blog, we talked about the benefits of Bi and its usage. Most of us still wonder, if this tool is domain specific and will it help us in our stream. Thus, let’s see how Power Bi can be used in digital marketing.
Marketing is all about researching and gathering information from various sources, compiling it together, and sending it in the charts, diagrams, graphs and what nots!! Even after you take so much time and effort, there is no guarantee that it will be read, thoroughly studied, remembered and appreciated by your bosses!
Thus, to avoid this futile attempt, Bi allows you to connect to hundreds of data sources, prepare pre & post analysis, consequently, prepare attractive charts, that will intrigue your peers and bosses, and may even clear your path of promotion! 😉 So, let’s get started!
1. Getting the data and uploading
To get started with Power BI you need to bring your data to Power BI. Once you upload the data to Power BI either using a file or service, it will be presented under Datasetstab. Dataset is a collection of data that the platform uses to create a visualization. The steps are;
External Data Tab – Data Sets – Excel, SQL or other sources like Azure, Facebook etc.
2. Modeling the data
Now, time to connect the data by finding “Relationship between the data sources “(quiet apt name! ) For example, you have gathered data for certain products, geography, manufacturers, suppliers etc. Relationship view on Power BI Desktop provides a diagrammatic view of your data with each block representing a table and its columns, and lines between them represent relationships.
By selecting Manage Relationship section under the home tab and select Autodetect you can find relationships in new or updated data.
You can create relationships on Many to One, One on One, One to Many basis. This simply links data to various sources, at the single click! Power Bi doesn’t allow for Many to Many connections, but why to create confusion anyway ?
3.Visualization
This part becomes easy and interesting, as compared to monotonous and confusing charts, graphs of excel. Power Bi provides a whole range of visualizations right from simple bar charts to pie charts. To create the visualization, you can drag the field names from fields plane and drop them into the report canvas and choose the type of visualization.
You can enhance the interactivity further by adding an on-canvas visual filter like a slicer. This allows anyone looking at the data to segment data by a particular value. Gauges and cards can also to improve interactivity.
Now that you have understood the basics of Bi in Digital Marketing, let’s see more of its usage, in my next blog.
Aishwarya Parchure
HR Head
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