Marketo Analytics with Power BI Reporting?

[Anonymous]

Has anyone had any success getting their Marketo data into Power BI using this out of the box integration? We went through all the steps documented in this Microsoft article​, but we keep receiving Marketo notifications for web services errors.

It's the same error each time. Error code 606: Max rate limit ‘%s’ exceeded with in ‘%s’ secs. The number of calls in the past 20 seconds was greater than 100.

We selected the minimum amount of data -- it asks how many months to load, and we selected "1" -- and for fives days running it made anywhere from 23,000 to 43,000 API calls each day... but that never resulted in a working dashboard.

If we keep letting it grind along, will we eventually get reports? Or should we give up on this and build something on our own? (Or is there a way to modify it to avoid those errors and eventually get the data we need?)

[Anonymous]

Thanks, Angelica! That's why we wanted to use the connector for now. The idea of doing some sort of custom build is pretty unappealing.

[Angelica_Krott]

Hi Osman. The advantage over a custom build is flexibility and also being able to fine tune the extract more to improve your processing time. There’s a lot of variables to the best route to pursue. At first, we chose the connector route but the processing time through it proved to be problematic. So not, we don’t use it for everything now and more so rely on the custom web client. Building a custom web client though to handle it could be done in under a week’s time if you have a skilled dev team. If you outsource, be prepared to know every speck of the data and how it relates to the overall reports you are trying to create.

https://www.stitchdata.com/docs/integrations/saas/marketo

Just be aware that many connectors, especially ones that have an existing Marketo connection, will only push to a data lake/data warehouse or SQL server.

Try looking at something like Stitch. Stitch does have a connector to both Marketo’s REST API and Bulk Extract API. And look through the Marketo dev documentation as well so you understand what type of calls / extracts you would need to do. I haven’t used them myself though so I can’t speak to how efficient their connectors are. It’s just an example for you.

But I strongly recommending first starting out with drawing what your reports should look like, then determining the necessary datasets / fields you’d need to pull from Marketo and map it to your storage repository. Finally, understand the volume of data you’d need to extract and at what frequency. There’s also some gotchas in how Marketo stores data. And just a heads up that the data out of the box is not in relational format. If you’re looking to create a relational database like we did, then you have to know how to extract all the needed datasets / activities appropriately and how all the tables would come together, etc.

It’s not an easy undertaking but it is possible. Just take it one step at a time and know the data.

[Rachit_Puri2]

Can someone please share some snapshots of dashboards that have been created using Power BI? We are currently exploring data dashboarding tools like Tableau, Qlik etc.

[Ashley_Langfor2]

It sounds like nobody here was able to get it to work.

[Mark_Price]

If this is the only thing you have connected to Marketo, it seems like Power BI does not respect Marketo's API limitations. Maybe try working with the vendor's support.

Haven't used Power BI, but I've been successful in extracting the data via custom code and the API:

http://developers.marketo.com/rest-api/bulk-extract/

http://developers.marketo.com/rest-api/lead-database/activities/#query

There may be solutions in launchpoint for the data extract.

[Anonymous]

Yes. Good idea. Thanks, Mark! Going to reply on that documentation page and see if one of the contributors can't help us out.

We have some other things that are connected to Marketo, but those have predictable patterns and much smaller volumes of API calls, so I'm certain those errors are being caused by Power BI.

[Ashley_Langfor2]

Hi Osman,

I tried using Power BI as well. It never worked. The only thing that it did was use all my API calls for one day. The only other thing I tried to sync was Google Anaytics and it worked but sadly Marketo never did.

[Anonymous]

Thanks, Ashley! Yes -- that's all I've gotten out of it too. Chewing up our API calls.

[SanfordWhiteman]

+1, it blows.

[Anonymous]

Yup. My feelings about it thus far.