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The speed with which businesses, products, and consumers generate data has reached a point that has never before been seen in history. Every 40 minutes, we create the same amount of data that was created between 2003 and the beginning of time, demonstrating just how expansive data production has become.
To manage the increasingly vast pool of data that businesses produce, many have turned to data analysis tools. In fact, data analysis is an industry that’s growing at around 18.6% every single year, with millions of companies across the globe using their data streams to form actionable insights.
Over recent years, the rise of embedded analytics has begun to capture a large percentage of data analysis, its offering of instant and reliable data analysis being valuable to businesses and customers alike. In this article, we’ll be exploring embedded analytics, demonstrating exactly how businesses are set to benefit by incorporating them into their daily systems.
Let’s get right into it.
What Is Embedded Analytics?
Embedded analytics is the process of incorporating live data insights into a platform or product. Instead of having to turn to harvesting data from a business intelligence platform, users will be able to see everything they need directly on the tool itself, without the need for an external analysis system.
This creates a system in which companies, and by extension, their users, can access real-time information about how a product is running. With data dashboards just a click away, embedded analysis removes all of the main barriers that prevent fast data analysis. From having access to these live analytics, users can identify issues or anomalies before they have a serious impact, ensuring that everything runs smoothly with your products.
How Could a Business Use Embedded Analytics?
There are three distinct methods through which a business can deploy embedded analytics. Each of these has a different use, targeting both a different user group as well as having distinct formats.
Typically, you’ll find embedded analytics within:
- An Internal Tool – Embedded analytics is all about pulling from many different sources and presenting it within a platform or product. This ensures that you won’t have to look for individual data sets, having everything in one accessible location. With this, businesses can streamline their decision-making process and rapidly conduct analytics on available data.
- In-Product Tools – One of the central ways that you can boost the utility of your product is by incorporating embedded analysis. Whether this is through an associated application that pulls together many different sets of statistics or within the product itself, having data accessible with the tap of a button is incredibly useful.
- Web – By incorporating live data into websites, you can bring a whole new dynamic element to your site. From including live polls in blog posts to incorporating data that continually updates to your landing pages, embedded analytics ensures that everyone can access the most recent information about your business.
As embedded analytics continues to grow as a field, we’re likely going to see even more deployments materialize down the line.
What Are the Benefits of Embedded Analytics?
When managing data, companies typically turn to cloud data storage to house all of their data at once. One of the direct benefits of using these cloud systems is that they’re perfect for pairing with embedded analytics tools, providing a continual point of access to company data.
While the majority of cloud data warehouses have internal analytics tools and systems, they are apart from the product itself. That’s where embedded analytics comes in, providing further benefits than simply analyzing data in a remote data collection and management system.
If you’re interested in connecting your business’s cloud data storage up to an embedded analytics tool, then be sure to select one that is most compatible with the information you want to display. By checking out a comparison between Redshift vs Clickhouse, you’ll see the various connections that can be created between embedded analytics tools and data warehouses.
Alongside convenience, there are several benefits of pairing up your data warehouse with an embedded analytics tool:
- Speed Advantage
- Benefits Customers
- Upselling Opportunity
- Stream of Contextual Data
Let’s break these down further.
Speed Advantage
Although the difference between running analytics within a business intelligence platform and conducting the same research within an embedded analytics tool is slight, the major difference comes with convenience. When using traditional data analysis platforms that are remote from the actual product or system that you’re analyzing, you have to navigate to the other system and run the numbers there.
On the contrary, when using embedded analytics, everything is directly in one place, providing a much higher degree of access to all users. Due to this, any analytics can be collected instantly, rather than having to wait. When it comes to the business advantage that actionable insights can generate for a company, the speed at which analysis is conducted does indeed matter.
As data continues to be produced at increasing rates, the increased access and convenience that embedded analytics provides will be a great asset.
Benefits Customers
Access to data, especially about a product or service, can radically alter the customer experience for the better. When embedding analytics streams into a platform, customers are able to understand exactly how the system is working, and how they can better use it.
Embedded analytics has become standard in many industries, printers being one physical example. When you buy a printer, there are now screens that show embedded analytics of how much ink is left in a cartridge. Alongside just being useful to know, this allows users to more effectively use the product they’ve purchased, helping your customers to get more out of your services.
Not only does this create a level of business-customer trust and appreciation, but actively incorporating embedded analytics into your systems instantly gives you a favorable advantage over your competitors.
Upselling Opportunity
Considering that embedded insights give users more information that they can use to better navigate or utilize a product or service, the option to include these analytical tools can be a great upselling opportunity.
By offering customers the option to include embedded analytics on their products, those that have an interest in data and refining their use of the product will jump at the opportunity. By offering this as an upsell, you’re able to generate more profit off your products by supplying something that is already at your disposal.
This is seen throughout the energy sector, with smart meters simply relaying information to customers for a premium cost.
In-Context Data Streams
An additional benefit to turning towards embedded analytics is that, by removing the need for external business intelligence applications, they continually provide a stream of data that is in context. When accessing this data, there is no chance that things can be misinterpreted or translated incorrectly when moving across different data architecture systems.
Due to this, embedded analytics allows your business to gain insight into your products in a natural environment. With everything in one place, pulling numbers and running analytics calculations becomes much easier, with this form of analytics reducing the number of necessary steps that your data engineers have to take to form conclusions.
Final Thoughts
Embedded analytics brings the utility of data-driven actionable insights into a new realm of convenience. Instead of having to manually search for data and run analysis, embedded insights are actively updating themselves, providing a centralized window where you can see everything that’s going on behind the curtain.
From increasing the speed with which businesses can run analysis to allowing further utility for customers that buy a product, embedded analytics is an incredibly valuable technology. As data production is increasing every single day, we’re likely to see even more progress in what embedded analytics can do for businesses in the coming future.
