Innovative Tableau

Chapter 99. 3 Innovative Ways to Integrate Other Products: Tip 2

3 Ways to Use Google with Dashboard Actions

Google has a number of powerful tools that can help with your business analyses. In addition to the native Google Analytics Tableau connection with which you can create customized Tableau dashboards from your web analytics data, other Google services can be integrated with Tableau using dashboard actions. This chapter shows you how to do an image search, view your paid search ads, and lookup a Google Trend, all from within a Tableau dashboard.

The following tips have several benefits, including:

• Efficiently adding a visual impact to your dashboards
• Providing context to you and your end users
• Improving your analyses with very little manual effort

How to Add a URL Dashboard Action to a Tableau Dashboard

To do a Google image search, view your Google paid search ads, or lookup a Google Trend, you will need to add a URL action to your Tableau dashboard. To lay the foundation for this tutorial, I am going to make a simple dashboard.

First, let’s place a horizontal layout container on a new dashboard. Within that layout container, place a bar chart showing Sales by Sub-Category and a Web Page object:

Note that when you add the Web Page object, Tableau asks you to enter a URL, but for now you need to leave this blank.

At this point, our dashboard looks like this. Note the ...