Tableau: Please provide us with some information about your company.
Sven Ballentin, Business Intelligence Analyst: Zattoo is an internet TV/TV streaming provider. We have various apps for Android and iOS but also big-screen apps, for instance via the Amazon Fire Stick, which can be used to watch TV. You can watch live TV but also recall things, meaning that certain TV stations' programs can be streamed up to seven days after their original air date.
Tableau: Who uses Tableau at your company?
Sven: The main users for Tableau are the marketing, management, and product teams.
Tableau: What is the Tableau solution used for in your company?
Sven: Churn rate, retention and our number of MAUs or monthly active users. What are the most-watched offerings on our service? What channels are popular at certain times? What shows are popular, broken down by age group and gender? These are the initial KPIs we want to analyze to begin with. That’s what we’re building dashboards for. Going forward, we’ll also carry out complete funnel analysis in the marketing team. In other words, what campaigns did the user arrive by? How many clicks did each campaign generate? And how many sign-ups? Which valuable users came from certain campaigns? So basically, which campaigns were ultimately the most effective?
Tableau: What data sources do you use?
Sven: In Vertica, and ultimately in the data warehouse, we tap into various data sources. These include the Hadoop archive but also some data from Google Analytics and campaign tracking. We have a partner called Adjust, which provides us with the data, and we use an API or server callback to pull the data to our data warehouse. Generally, Tableau is connected to this data warehouse—to Vertica.
It contains everything about usage. In that regard, we’ve already progressed a lot so that the management team analyzes daily Tableau exports or uses live dashboards to clarify management-related questions.
Tableau: How satisfied are your users?
Sven: Recently I received an email from the head of HR. She saw Tableau and used it for the first time about a month ago and immediately sent me an email with "Tableau Lover" as the subject line. Everyone who sees Tableau at our company is immediately enthusiastic about it. Therefore, the satisfaction levels are relatively high, simply because the dashboards are so nice or because they can be built so nicely—and also far more intuitively compared to the old Excel monsters we used to have.
Tableau: What do you like about Tableau in particular?
I can click on things, change the KPI, set the dimensions and filters differently and thereby save a lot of time on my way to gaining insight.
Sven: I am the main user of Tableau, and what I like in particular about Tableau is the ease of use and the speed of analyzing things. I used to have to pull the data out of Hadoop, import it to an Excel table, and analyze the data or generate some plots with Air scripts. It took ages, and when I made a mistake, I had to start over. This is a lot faster with Tableau—an extremely important point.
Another point is the variability and interactivity of visual illustration. I can click on things, change the KPI, set the dimensions and filters differently and thereby save a lot of time on my way to gaining insight.
What I personally enjoy a lot about Tableau is simply playing around with it. I have a hypothesis and just go wild playing around with the data to see what happens.
Ultimately, this creative process is a lot easier with Tableau. And I really appreciate that.