The Top 5 Reasons to Adopt Embedded Analytics

By: Phil D'Amico | February 10, 2023

Embedded analytics is a powerful tool that can provide many benefits to organizations. It can improve user adoption, increase efficiency, enhance security and provide a better contextualization of the data. By embedding analytics within existing systems and applications, organizations can gain a competitive edge and make better data-driven decisions. If you’re looking for ways to improve your organization’s data analytics capabilities, embedded analytics is definitely worth considering.

So you’ve heard about embedded analytics, but you’re not quite sure how it can help your business. The first place to start is understanding what exactly it is and how it can fit into your day-to-day workflow.

According to a recent report, the embedded analytics market was valued at $36.08 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach $77.52 billion by the end of 2026, projected at a growth rate of 13.6% over the forecast period 2020-25.

The Gartner definition of embedded analytics is the use of reporting and analytic capabilities within transactional business applications, such as a CRM, ERP, etc. Those capabilities may reside outside the applications but must be easily accessible from inside without forcing users to switch between systems.

Simply put, it’s the technology designed to make data analysis and business intelligence more accessible by all kinds of applications or users.

Embedded analytics integrates visualizations and dashboards that offer contextual intelligence into employee workflows in existing systems, delivering timely and relevant insights to the user without the disruption of shuffling data around and switching between multiple applications.

So what can embedded analytics do for you? Well, here are some of the practical ways we’ve seen embedded analytics help our clients:

1. Drive Self-Service Analytics with Your Customers

While you may create the perfect dashboard to answer your most pressing business questions today, there’s no predicting what questions you’ll be asking in the future and will need to answer at a moment’s notice. That’s where embedded analytics comes in. Embedded analytics gives your business users and customers flexible tools for analyzing data right where they need them the most.

A great example is the use of embedded analytics in Salesforce. With the use of prescriptive and predictive analytics, you can analyze the trends you see at any given moment and make decisions right in the same application. Whether your strategy is to focus on further engaging current leads, following up on leads that have not responded in a week, or prioritizing large sales leads, embedded analytics empowers you to ask and answer questions using the data and tools at your fingertips. You can answer questions inspired by the application and have the visualization ready at hand to summarize and display an answer—quickly and without the need for additional support.

2. Enhance Your Blog Posts and Content via Interactive Visualizations

You already know that visualization is a powerful way to understand your data and gain actionable insights into your business. How about using the same techniques in your communications with current and potential clients by embedding dashboards in your blog posts? This not only enables you to clearly show illustrations supporting the content of your post, but also helps your readers better understand the message and even explore the data that led you to your conclusions. Additionally, it helps build credibility for your content and messaging by displaying the data from which the information derives from.

3. Strengthen Your Internal Knowledge Bases and CRM Systems

You’re already delivering analytics to your customers and the benefits that go along with it. So why should your business be any different? Knowledge bases and CRM systems can house invaluable information about customer behavior, who your high opportunity clients are, and which offerings or technologies customers and employees are most interested in.

You can embed dashboards to track metrics such as net promoter score (NPS), time to complete certain tasks or projects, and interactions/touches with customers. This allows you to assess which resources are best at performing certain tasks, efficiently allocate resources, and determine how to further engage customers by providing more of the content most relevant to them.

4. Improve Custom Mobile Applications

As technology continues to evolve, people have a growing need to consume their data and reporting on the go. Once you have a platform like Tableau providing mobile friendly dashboards, the next step is to supplement your mobile apps with dynamic, visual elements to really help you gain the most from your information when and where you need it.

5. Create a Customized, Continuous Analytics Solution

Branding is a critical element to the effectiveness of any organization. You want to have control over your dashboard color palettes, design, and icons because a cohesive look builds confidence and trust. By incorporating embedded analytics, you can deliver powerful, beautiful visualizations that inform and inspire your end user, showcasing your company’s brand and extending its reach.

Tableau is by far the most powerful and flexible end-to-end platform for visual analytics. By embedding Tableau visualizations in your other applications, you’re providing a customized experience for your end user. You’re also enabling functionality that is not natively integrated in Tableau Server/Online. This allows you to, for example, export multiple dashboards with a single click of the mouse, or apply a global filter to multiple dashboards.

Whatever business problems you’re facing on a given day, embedded analytics allows you to tackle them more effectively by offering the tools needed to understand your data right where your data lives and your end user works. Embedded analytics has helped our customers build their data culture, increase productivity, enhance their content, and improve customer satisfaction.