Analytics Canvas now with direct integration with Tableau

Anyone who has used Tableau Software knows how powerful dynamic visual analytics can be. But they also know sometimes it can be hard to get the data ready when it is coming from multiple sources, and requires cleaning or preparation. Getting that data in shape is exactly what Analytics Canvas is best at- Canvas gets the data together and fixed up, Tableau provides beautiful visual analytics.

Many Analytics Canvas customers are also Tableau users, and we are long time users ourselves. That is why we’re thrilled to announce that we are now Tableau technical partners, and that we are releasing today the beta for a tight integration with Tableau.

Analytics Canvas and Tableau fit together so well that we are tempted to start talking about chocolate and peanut butter, coffee and mornings, barbecues and long summer evenings… but we’ll resist the urge.

Here’s how it works- Analytics Canvas can now directly generate Tableau TDE files, making the link from data to workbook easier than ever before. You can link your data exports directly to workbooks- refresh the data, and in a click you are looking at the updated dashboards. This functionality is now active in beta in the standard trial version- you can sign up here for a trial, if you are already an Analytics Canvas user, just upgrade to V1.7.5 and you are set.

A Powerful Solution that can stop Google Analytics Sampling in Tableau dashboards

One of the key capabilities that Analytics Canvas brings to Google Analytics users is the ability to avoid sampling in most cases. It does this by automatically partitioning the query into smaller time periods then reassembling the data- the net result is that even with hundreds of thousands of visitors a day, sampling can be eliminated- and the full, detailed data can be loaded into your Tableau dashboards in a single step.

“With the addition of Tableau Data Extracts as an output format, Analytics Canvas helps Tableau users to mitigate sampling and perform transforms on their Google Analytics data in a seamless user experience.”– Jeff Feng, Product Manager, Tableau Software

To help illustrate what is possible, we’ve included some powerful templates that let you pick the Google Analytics views you want to analyze, and put you directly into a powerful Tableau Dashboard with your unsampled data. Pick the example canvas called “Eliminate Google Analytics Sampling” to try it out;

This TDE generation is just the first step in our integration- you can now generate TWBX and .Hyper files, and you can publish directly to Tableau Server or Tableau Online!

A new level of Facebook Graph API access

Also new in this version is the new Facebook connector- enabling you to dive into Facebook data- both for your own pages through Graph API, and for your competitors pages. Understand in detail who is posting what and when, with what results. Get a complete history of all your posts and use Tableau to visualize their performance, and compare to other pages. See here the kind of thing that is possible- with tens of thousands of Facebook posts visualized in Tableau: