Google reviews to Tableau

Through an OData v4 feed that Reviewflowz publishes. You create a connection in Reviewflowz and copy its feed URL, then in Tableau choose Connect, OData, and paste it. Set Authentication to Username and Password, put the token in the user name field and leave the password blank. Tableau lists the tables and you drag in the ones you want. There is nothing to install: the OData connector ships with Tableau.

Extract. Tableau Desktop supports extracts only for OData sources, so that is the connection you get, and it is the right one here anyway. Review volume is small next to your transactions table, the extract builds in seconds, and a published workbook backed by an extract opens instantly for the people who only came to look at it.

One row per review with the rating, the review date, the location name, the review profile, the reviewer name, the title, the full text, the language, the tags, the topics and the owner reply with its date. Alongside it sits a Locations table with the name, city, country, postcode, primary category and the latitude and longitude, plus your review profiles, your ratings history, a review summary and a change stream of inserts, updates and deletes.

No. Locations carries a real latitude and longitude per site, so Tableau assigns the geographic roles itself and the map draws from the numbers rather than from a name it has to guess at. That is the difference between a map you build on Tuesday afternoon and a mapping project you scope.

You refresh the extract, and how that is scheduled is a setting in your own Tableau deployment rather than something we run. On the Reviewflowz side each Google Business Profile is checked about every couple of hours, so the feed already has the new reviews by the time Tableau asks for them.

It reaches the feed. A reviewer who edits a one star into a four star after you fixed the thing they complained about, and a review Google takes down, both arrive as events on the change stream rather than as a silence, so the numbers in the workbook do not quietly drift away from what is on the listing.

Yes. Connecting the Google Business Profile loads its review history, so the trend line is full from the first extract rather than filling up over the next quarter. Bear in mind that volume tracks footfall, so the history spikes at weekends and after campaigns rather than on a release schedule.

The BI feed is a Premium feature and it is not part of the free trial, so budget for that rather than finding out on day three. Everything else works the way the trial suggests: you connect your Google Business Profile yourself and see your reviews in minutes.

No. You connect your Google Business Profile and create the BI connection yourself, in under five minutes. If you get stuck, support is the people who build it.