We can provide a better perspective on data by adding external data sources. There are many applications where external data is extremely useful to the organization. For example, your marketing organization may be interested to know how your marketing campaigns impact your website, which in turn impacts your sales. Tableau is well suited to this type of analysis, and it provides a range of connectors so that you can mix external data sources together.
In an earlier chapter, we retrieved the country data from the Microsoft Windows Azure Datamarket. In this recipe, we will take a look at retrieving data from Google Analytics using the Tableau connector. Google Analytics is a tool that helps you to analyze traffic to your website, and many businesses make use of this free facility.
As in the case with the previous recipes in this chapter, we will continue to use the Chapter Four
workbook.
To summarize, mashing up your external data with your internal data can mean that you get richer results and analyses from the data. This means that your dashboards are essential tools for helping to drive decisions and insight throughout your organization, and your colleagues will thank you for it!