Tableau: Building Business Intelligence Across Data Bridges
Imagine having to manage data generated by four billion impressions every day. That’s a lot of data by any standard and that’s exactly what Tableau BI does for Yahoo! Tricia Lord is BI product manager with Yahoo! Advertiser and she says that without Tableau it would impossible to manage the Yahoo! database which is one of the largest multi-dimensional databases in the world.
Functionality & Usability
Based on her fifteen years experience in the BI industry, Tricia is in no doubt about the advanced capabilities of Tableau. The superior functionality and usability of Tableau at end user level not only made the decision to implement Tableau easy, but also made the implementation process easy. In short she says it’s, “easy to deploy, easy to set up and easy to maintain.” In addition to that Tableau helps users make better decisions. 
Tableau allows Yahoo! users to make key decisions about their advertising campaigns by identifying which ad sizes work better and which audience segments are responding to ads. Prior to installing Tableau, users did not have access to this information. But the benefits don’t stop there. Tableau users can customise their own reports, which means that firstly they don’t have to rely on an internal IT team to do that.
Flexibility
Secondly, they can take any parameter be it advertiser, publisher or segment and run a report based on that field. As well as giving users increased flexibility, that also meant that Yahoo! simply had to create basic report templates and users could then manipulate them to suit their individual queries.
"Speed Of Thought Analysis"
Tricia identifies what she calls ‘speed of thought analysis’ as the biggest advantage of this system. This means that users can read the results of a query and then by simply adding a new data field or visual, they bring that data to the next level. Tricia confirms that Tableau has been a key tool in the development of Yahoo! Advertiser as it allows the company to see, at a glance, global trends, identify where those trends are coming from and why.
Her point? Tableau is a key component that makes Yahoo! Advertiser such a powerful Internet advertising tool.
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