For those that use Power BI for reporting, where are you sending your data from Marketo?

[Ross_Smith]

Hey everyone!

We're starting to leverage Power BI for our email analytics reporting. As of right now we're taking that data in monthly data exports and consolidating into 1 large CSV, which we use for Power BI.  There has to be a better way to get the data Marketo/Revenue Explorer over to Power BI. 

How are you all getting your data out of Marketo and where are you storing it to connect with your Power BI or any other BI tool?

Open to any and all suggestions!

[Phillip_Wild]

Hi Ross,

It seems like there used to be a Power BI connector but it doesn't seem like it was much good, so it was deprecated.

The best way is by using the Marketo REST API to extract activities in bulk. You can then throw it into Azure (if you use it) or another data warehouse such as Redshift before importing it into Power BI for analysis. This will require development work but is really the best way to do it since there are considerations around throttling, the activities you want to import, etc etc.

Sorry, not a simple solution but that's the way long term.

[Ross_Smith]

Thank you, Phillip!

[Michael_Florin]

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It seems like there used to be a Power BI connector but it doesn't seem like it was much good, so it was deprecated.

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Hello all,

are there any fresh insights regarding that connector? I see it in Power BI, I made the connection, and at first glance, the results seem to be fine. It loaded our Marketo Sandbox data pretty much instantly and I see all records, programs and campaigns in Power BI now.

The sample size is small though. Just 1000 person records and a handful of active programs. Any idea how this will perform under load?

Thanks!
Michael

[Darshil_Shah1]

I'm given to understand that one needs to be very cautious with the Power BI-Marketo connector as a start date for getting all the activity data that is way in the past would end up consuming a lot of your API calls.  It's usually recommended to select the start from more than a few days ago as you see its load on your Marketo instance. Extracting data using the bulk APIs and then feeding it to the PowerBI is way more scalable and also gives way more control over the data that is being sent to the PowerBI.