Six ways to offer a superior experience with embedded analytics

We live in an increasingly data-driven world. With data everywhere in our lives, the expectation to access meaningful information when making decisions has only grown - especially in the context of everyday business.

Embedding analytics is a great way to facilitate insights and provide meaningful data when and where your audiences need it. Whether you’re a software provider or an organization offering services or information to partners or customers, you can increase your value by integrating rich, analytical capabilities into applications, portals, and websites.

However, effective embedded analytics solutions offer more than just pretty report snapshots. If you want to offer a superior experience with an embedded analytics solution, here are some things to consider.

1. Enable powerful insights with the right data access and capabilities
Interactivity is key to self-service analytics. If users can’t play with the data to ask and answer their own questions, why are you offering embedded analytics in the first place? Modern analytics sheds new light on previously challenging sources and quantities of data, including IoT and geospatial data. Provide a robust solution that easily connects to and surfaces the data that matters, and present more meaningful analysis with features like predictive analytics.

2. Offer analytics without breaking the workflow
Business users shouldn’t have to navigate into separate applications to access data that’s critical to their work. Instead, bring data right into your application, portal, or web pages with an iframe or API and give them easy access with single sign-on. Set filter values to help tailor the experience to the user. Enable them to view and interact with their data anytime, anywhere—including from mobile devices and other hardware.

3. Provide a continuous experience through look and feel
The most tightly integrated embedded solutions don’t just continue the functionality of a user’s workflow, but also maintain consistent branding. If you purchase, be sure to customize your embedded analytics solution beyond the color scheme. Include custom modifications like sliders and buttons that tie the visual analytic exploration nicely into your application or site functions.

4. Stay innovative to maintain ongoing value
Deploying a great analytics solution today doesn’t guarantee its value tomorrow. To keep up with evolving customer needs, you’ll need to ensure you can make valuable improvements and take them to market quickly. This can mean heavy investments on research and resources, or a partnership with an industry leader whose innovations are driven by trusted expertise and global user feedback.

5. Ensure stability and scalability
To minimize deployment roadblocks, be sure your embedded solution will align to your data strategy and jive with your current technology investments - whether you’re deployed on-premises or in the cloud, running on Windows or Linux. It’s not only important to get up and running easily, but to be able to grow your analytics solution as needed to maintain healthy performance for your users.

6. Seek speed to market and speed to impact
Lessen the learning curve with an intuitive analytics solution that helps your audience ask questions of their data quickly. Should you choose to integrate a widely-used, leading analytics solution, you'll not only benefit from less time required to develop and launch, but can leverage any expertise of those already familiar with its features and functionality. Similarly, your Embedded analytics offers plenty of benefits for your organization, too

With an embedded analytics solution, you can collect your own data to better understand how audiences use your solution and what data is important to them. You can use these insights to inform decisions to keep your solutions more competitive and valuable.

Additionally, many organizations that provide embedded analytics also see increased audience engagement, decreased churn, and faster revenue growth. But the opportunity as it stands today will be an obligation tomorrow, as data access and decision-making become more ubiquitous. You need to offer data right where it can have an impact—your competitors certainly will, if they aren’t already.

Tracy Rodgers is Product Marketing Manager at Tableau.