This article describes how to connect Tableau to Marketo data and set up the data source.

Before you begin

Before you begin, gather this connection information:

  • Custom Service Endpoint
  • Client ID
  • Client Secret

For details about how to create the custom service information you need from Marketo to connect, see the Custom Service topic on the Marketo website.

Make the connection and set up the data source

  1. Start Tableau and under Connect, select Marketo. For a complete list of data connections, select More under To a Server. Then do the following:
    1. Enter your Custom Service Endpoint, Client ID, and Client Secret.
    2. Select Sign In.
    3. Select Filter Type: Relative date range or Fixed date range, and then select or specify the range.
    4. Select Connect to authorize Marketo to securely share your data with Tableau Desktop.

      If Tableau can't make the connection, verify that your credentials are correct. If you still can't connect, your computer is having trouble locating the server. Contact your network or Marketo administrator.

  2. On the data source page, do the following:
    1. (Optional) Select the default data source name at the top of the page, and then enter a unique data source name for use in Tableau. For example, use a data source naming convention that helps other users of the data source figure out which data source to connect to.

    2. Under Table, select a table and drag it to the top of the canvas.
    3. Select the sheet tab to start your analysis.

      After you select the sheet tab, Tableau imports the data by creating an extract. Note that Tableau Desktop supports only extracts for Marketo. You can update the data by refreshing the extract. For more information, see Extract Your Data.

      Creating extracts may take some time depending on the amount of data that is included.

Bulk API retrieves data for some tables

Tableau uses the bulk API to retrieve data for the All Activities, Leads, and Leads by List - <list name> tables, thereby reducing the number of API calls. For more information, see the Bulk Extract documentation on the Marketo website.

You can use the Daily API Usage and Weekly API Usage tables to monitor your API usage.

Marketo data source example

Here is an example of a Marketo data source using Tableau Desktop on a Windows computer:

Use Dashboard Starters

If you are connecting to your data through Tableau Online, you can use a Dashboard Starter to quickly build informative dashboard designs made specifically for key business metrics. For more information, see Dashboard Starters for Cloud-based Data.

Date range selections can impact performance

It’s tempting to gather as much data as possible when you do an analysis, however, retrieving records from Marketo can be time-consuming. Tableau doesn’t know how much data there is in a particular date range until it retrieves the data. For this reason, you should restrict your date range at first, and then expand after you evaluate performance.

To give you a rough idea of how much time it might take to retrieve data from Marketo, tests were conducted using a high-speed connection. This table shows how long it took in the test environment to retrieve a given number of records.

Number of records

Time to retrieve


4.5 seconds


45 seconds


8 minutes


75 minutes

See also
