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Data Visualization Tips & Tricks

Data Visualization Tips & Tricks by Martijn Verstrepen

Connecting Tableau to Piwik

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These past few months I’ve seen a rapid rise in the use of Piwik as a webanalytics solution. My clients are choosing Piwik as an alternative to paid solutions like ComScore Digital Analytix or free solutions like Google Analytics. Benefits include the data storage location, ownership of data and the ability to access non aggregate data.

Piwik stores clickstream data like visitors, visits and pageviews but is also able to store information like onsite search queries and eCommerce data. Data is stored within a MySQL database which can be hosted wherever you want giving you full control over data ownership and data storage location. I’ve seen implementations with over >100M interactions a year and I am currently working within an organization implementing a 50M interactions a year setup.

Analyzing the data gathered by Piwik can be done through their web interface which allows you to generate reports and segment the data, but as a Tableau enthusiast I was also curious if I could connect directly to the underlying MySQL database. It turns out you can! [Read more…]

Sorting percent change from Quick Table Calculation in Tableau

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Reporting on the most visited pages within your website can be a rather static endeavor if your most popular content doesn’t change very often. Changing this report to a list of pages with the largest change (both positive and negative) in visits is most likely a lot more interesting.

Tableau Absolute Sorted

Tableau Absolute Sorted

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Plotting two different time series on the same line graph in Tableau

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Update: I’ve written a new article that makes it easier to plot two time series in the same graph.

Tableau is a great and easy to use data visualization tool, allowing you to create beautiful and meaningful visualizations within minutes.

From time to time I run into visualizations that are harder to implement in Tableau. Comparing two time series on a day level within the same line graph is one of them. Many webanalytics solutions like Google Analytics or ComScore Digital Analytix come with these kind of visualizations build in so replicating this in Tableau is a must for me.

I’ll share the steps I’ve taken to create a similar visualization in Tableau in this blogpost.

ComScore Digital Analytix Line Graph Reference Period

ComScore Digital Analytix current period vs reference period

Google Analytics Line Graph Reference Period

Google Analytics Line Graph current period vs reference period

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