The Best Way to Embed Analytics into your App in 2024

What is Embedded Analytics?

Embedded analytics, or 'customer-facing analytics', involves incorporating data analysis and visualization tools into your application.

The main purpose of embedded analytics is to provide an engaging and useful reporting experience for your customers, users, partners, investors, or other stakeholders, giving them access to insights and actionable information.

There are lots of specific use-cases for showing reports and dashboards to users of your app or platform. For instance:

• Enable strategic partners to self-serve data requests.
• Empower front-line employees with data, so they can quickly and easily access information for their jobs.
• Summarize your customers’ activity with your app, so they understand the value they’re getting.
• Show engaging statistics to your website visitors to increase engagement and sharing.

Check out this article to see some real-life examples of user-facing-analytics. We've included Stripe, Squarespace, Spotify, Mailchimp, Intercom, and Shopify, and detailed what makes them so good.

The 3 approaches to building analytics experiences into your app, in 2024

There are three approaches to building an analytics experience into your platform.

(1) Use an out-of-the-box solution.

Using a 3rd party out-of-the-box analytics solution enables you to get something up and out there in a short time (we've covered the main user-facing analytics platforms here).

You can throw together some charts and reports on a canvas or dashboard, and embed that into your platform using, in most cases, an iFrame.

In most cases, you'll manage one master-template dashboard, and it will automatically apply filters so that only the right data is shown to each customer and nothing else.

We launched Trevor.io in 2016, a BI tool that was initially designed as an internal data querying and visualisation tool and has since acquired the feature that enables you to embed its dashboards into your app - in much the same way as the other leading BI tools that are available on the market.

However, existing solutions for in-app customer-facing analytics and dashboards often fall down in various ways: 

• They simply aren't designed for the customer-facing use-case - most are just internal BI tools, that have tagged on an embeddable option
• They don't look like a part of your own platform - most allow you to change the color scheme and fonts, but this only touches the surface of what product and design teams really consider important for UX and design
• Their learning curve is far too steep - a learning curve for an internal BI tool is usually expected, but customers looking for reporting in an app do not have the same level of patience
• Caching is usually an afterthought or surprisingly-often just completely missing - customer-facing analytics needs to be instant, whereas internal BI can usually get away with being slower to load
• Iterating on the dashboards usually requires engineering resource - but customer-facing teams want to be able to deliver updates to reports as and when their customers ask for them

This brings us to the next approach.

(2) Build it from scratch.

Until now, the only alternative to using a 3rd party out-of-the-box analytics tool has been to build the experience yourself from scratch.

However, building customer-facing analytics is hard.

It’s not a one-off sprint where “when it’s done, it’s done”.

It is a long-term commitment, with the opening of a door to never-ending feature- and data- requests from your own data-hungry customers.

Here are some quotes from tech leaders that we've picked up along the way.

• “We've invested years of effort in building our custom filtering + dashboard/reporting capabilities” (Head of Product, People Tech Company, US)
• “We’ve spent a year building out our customer-facing analytics platform. Still not finished.” (CEO, Public Sector Data Platform, Germany)
• "Dashboarding has been planned and prioritized but we've been putting it off because it’s too complicated" (CEO, Adtech Platform, US)

(3) Use Embeddable.com.

This third option is what we’ve built.

It’s a completely new approach based on everything we’ve learned from running Trevor.io and building analytics experiences ourselves from scratch.

How is Embeddable different?

While all other in-app customer-facing analytics solutions try to convince customers to “buy instead of build”, Embeddable is a javascript SDK that lets you build your own customer-facing analytics, exactly the way you want it, but in 10% of the time. i.e. it combines the very best of both options:

1. Our SDK wraps your favorite charting libraries, as well as your own platform’s components (standard buttons and dropdowns that you already have in your product) so that you’re building an “Embeddable” that looks and feels exactly like your own platform
2. You define the data models (Orders, Transactions, Schools, Campaigns, Products, etc.) that you want to make available to your customer
3. Via a point-and-click interface your customer-facing teams can easily “add this chart, using data from this data model” and publish changes, in seconds, directly to your live platform.
4. They only need to worry about giving your customers or other users the analytics they want to see, and we worry about everything else:
5. Performance - your data is live and loads instantly
6. Security - you build one dashboard, and every customer will only ever see the data they are allowed to see
7. Feature requests - we know what your customers will want: exporting, sharing, scheduling, customizing, internationalisation, drill-downs, etc, so these features are all out-of-the-box features you can toggle on in a click
8. Self-service - protect yourself from getting bombarded by data requests - let your customers ask their own questions, within a controlled data environment customized by you

We haven’t officially launched yet, but it’s already being used by top companies in Europe and North America, and we couldn’t be more excited.

Want to get involved in Embeddable?

After the success of our oversubscribed Alpha, the Lighthouse Programme, and the successful launch of our Private Beta, Embeddable is now publicly available. More information on how to work with us can be found at on our homepage at embeddable.com.

You can also:

Join our community here.

Follow us on Linkedin, here.

Book a call with our team, here.

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