The Product Manager’s Guide to Embedded Analytics

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Content3 Introduction 4 5 Benefits of Embedded Analytics

6 The Next Step: Building vs. Buying

8 Lightning AI: Cost Savings and Flexible Access to Data

10 Kongregate: Delivering Fresh, Interactive Data for Customers

12 Embedded Analytics with Periscope Data

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Introduction

Embedded analytics are the best way to share data. They maintain all of the carefully designed structure and research of traditional data reporting, but automate the manual, time-consuming processes of delivery and data refreshes. Once a report is built and embedded, it’s always current.

If your company is still downloading and emailing static data reports, it’s time to reconsider. Think about how much your company’s data requests have increased recently and try to anticipate how your current team of data experts will react to even more reporting requests in the future. Embeds are an easy way to avoid recreating the same reports or fielding multiple requests to revise a report once it’s already been created.

In this guide, we’ll cover the benefits of embedded analytics for internal and external analytics delivery, guide you through the build vs. buy conversation and share stories from customers who have found success with this product.

If your company has already started this conversation and wants to skip ahead to a specific part, use the table of contents as a guide to locate the most pertinent content.

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5 Benefits of Embedded Analytics

Businesses today create tools that collect and publish data about a wide range of activity in real time. Facebook can tell you how many people interacted with the post you shared, Amazon can send you a purchase confirmation with personalized recommendations about complementary products and Fitbit tracks up-to-the-step information about a customer’s physical activity in a day.

Consumer interaction with these tools has changed the culture around data. People expect access to accurate, real-time information whenever they need it. This expectation is carried into other parts of their daily lives, with demands for data increasing, along with a desire to filter or sort analytics in a number of new ways to answer new questions.

To satisfy this new breed of customer, product managers need to create an experience for customers that gives them the data they need in real time. Embedded analytics make it possible to meet that customer demand without burning through their limited development time and resources.

Here’s a quick look at some of the ways companies are using embedded analytics to improve product experience for their customers and give them more value for their time.

Improved Customer Service

Access to the Freshest Data

Companies that can put data directly into the hands of their customers are giving them an improved product experience. When data-savvy customers have questions about the product or their usage, they can answer those questions with the data that is available to them. Embedding data also makes it easy for customers to quantify the value for a product or service. The more robust and interactive the data provided, the easier it is to allow them to find value in that information. Better customer experience means better retention rates and ultimately, higher LTV.

Once a report or chart is created and embedded, the data stays connected and refreshes as often as needed. Different customers need data from your company at unique intervals. Embedded analytics lets the customers proactively access the analytics they need on their own timeline with confidence that the information will be current.

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If customers can answer their own questions with embedded analytics, they won’t need as much support from the company. This lightens the load on the support team and creates a healthy habit in that customer base of digging into analytics to handle questions. With the extra bandwidth, the support team can provide better care for existing requests or create documentation to proactively reduce future support tickets.

It’s natural that curious customers will analyze data in a way that prompts new questions. By clicking through responsive charts, they’ll be able to answer their own new questions instantly, without having to make follow-up requests to your team. Interactive embedded data allows anyone to filter the information in any way they’d like or drill down on specific data points to learn more. For data-hungry customers, embedded analytics satisfy their curiosity. Customers who are new to data analysis can move at their own speed, increasing data literacy at a pace that’s comfortable for them.

Embedded dashboards can be built straight into any tool that’s already a part of a customer’s experience. This way, they don’t have to learn a new login/password or navigate to a new site to see metrics. Instead, you can embed the relevant analytics directly inside of the sites they already access to enrich their current experience instead of giving them another new tool to learn.

Reduced Customer Support Requests

Interactive Data Visualizations

Data Where the Customer Needs It

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The Next Step: Building vs. Buying

Once you’ve decided to make the move to embedded analytics, you’ve taken a huge step in increasing your company’s overall data maturity. The next step is to determine how you get from where you are now to a point where your embedded analytics are running smoothly. For most companies at this stage, it’s time to decide whether you’ll build your own solution or purchase these capabilities from a third party.

In general, building gives your team greater control over the final product but takes longer to build and requires a heavy investment of your development resources. Purchasing those capabilities will streamline the delivery of your analytics, but your team will have less control over the solution.

There are benefits and risks to each approach. Below is a quick summary of what your team can expect with regard to building vs. buying embedded analytics capabilities.

Pros:

• Complete customization of analytics to match your data infrastructure and brand look and feel

• All security and stability concerns can be managed internally

• New features are built according to a company’s most pressing needs

Pros:

• Available immediately with high quality out-of-the-box functionality

• Product improvements can be made without additional internal developer resources

• Predictable costs for long-term budgeting

Cons:

• Requires engineering resources that could be used on more strategic initiatives

• Takes longer to build, test and deploy

• New feature creation and maintenance will consume future resources

Cons:

• Reporting design/features are dependent on third-party solution

• Potential for integration issues or complications

• Vendors take roadmap input from multiple clients, not just your company

Building Embedded Analytics

Buying Embedded Analytics

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The questions to help you decide

If your team is debating whether to build or buy your embedded analytics, here are a few simple questions that can help you come to a conclusion. Gather the necessary stakeholders together and have a discussion about each of these questions, going in depth on your company’s current needs and future plans.

Maintaining complete control over the look and feel of the information

Making embedded analytics available as soon as possible

If you want embedded analytics made to your exact specifications, you’ll need to keep it in house. Build it yourself.

The infrastructure is already there, just plug in your data and send. Buy it.

There can’t be any opportunity for company information to be compromised

If a vendor has the right security certifications, they’re trustworthy

Your company/product can’t integrate with other modern products. Build.

Once third-party products have been thoroughly vetted and approved, they’re reliable. Buy.

Developer bandwidth Money

Have extra developers waiting on projects and want to make analytics a key differentiator? Build.

Have the budget to invest and don’t need to make analytics delivery a strategic business focus? Buy.

Analytics tool maintenance Product improvements

If embeds are a point of differentiation for your product, you’ll need to constantly devote resources to update it. Build.

Want to focus 100% of your personnel resources on new features for your proprietary product? Buy.

You’ll blaze your own custom trail The professionals can handle that

You know where you’re going and an external partner might not keep up. Build.

Data platforms have a clear vision for what a modern company will need. Buy.

Which is more important?

Do security concerns limit your company’s ability to integrate with other tools?

Which resource does your team want to invest in this project right now?

Where do you want to invest future engineering resources?

Who should control the roadmap for your embedded analytics features?

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Lightning AI: Cost Savings and Flexible Access to Data

From the early days at the company, Lightning AI founder and CEO Colette Nataf knew she wanted Periscope Data’s dashboards to play a powerful role in her company’s data aggregation and analytics process. Having used Periscope Data at a previous company, she recognized the power it gave her to connect data from many sources, then quickly visualize that data for her customers in an easy and accessible format.

When a new customer begins working with Lightning AI, Colette’s team builds them a custom dashboard within minutes that then becomes embedded within Lightning AI’s application. They start with a default dashboard, link the customer’s data sources and match the relevant filters for their ad accounts. Each customer can then instantly navigate through their own data in a familiar UI without having to jump to other applications.

Colette estimates that without Periscope Data, the costs required to develop a dashboard with pivot table capabilities, search functions and other features and customizations would have cost at least $100k, including expenses and the valuable time the project would take away from her engineering team.

“Time means everything to us as we’re building our business. It’s pretty amazing that we’ve been able to devote engineering resources to the tasks that help grow our business instead of diverting our focus to worry about the dashboard building process,” said Colette.

Lightning AI — A mix of AI-powered technology & managed services to find target audiences and automate advertising tasks on Facebook, Google, Instagram and more.

Problem Lightning AI needed a way to provide customers across a range of analytical abilities with access to data about their marketing spend.

Action Using Embedded Analytics, Lightning AI created a template to deliver uniform marketing analytics with fresh data to customers inside their existing application.

Resolution Lightning AI saved time and more than $100k on a data delivery system while streamlining access. They also increased their customers’ data literacy by establishing a single source of truth for marketing data.

Industry: MarketingCustomer Since: 2016

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Periscope helps us surface data in wonderful and beautiful ways. Instead of us having to do tons of manual programming to join many different data sets together, it literally takes less than a minute in Periscope, and that’s incredible for us.”

Colette Nataf Founder & CEO, Lightning AI

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For many customers, the combination of Lightning AI and Periscope Data gives them unique access to their marketing data that previously couldn’t be aggregated. Many companies they work with have internal BI systems, but they aren’t connected to marketing data. In those cases, Lightning AI connects to an embedded dashboard, functioning as a single source of truth for that marketing data.

In other cases, Periscope Data’s exposure to pivot tables helps non-technical customers search and explore their data easily. “We’re selling our product to customers who often don’t write in SQL, so we get a ton of value from Periscope Data just by allowing them to access their data on terms that are familiar to them.”

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Kongregate: Delivering Fresh, Interactive Data for Customers

From the outset, Kongregate wanted to empower developers to improve their games with data. To assist game creators, Kongregate’s idea was to build a uniform set of on-demand business metrics for every game.

To deliver that data, Kongregate needed an analytics provider that could automatically collect data and instantly pipe pre-determined KPIs into a templated dashboard inside the developer environment. After careful consideration, Kongregate chose Periscope Data as their data platform.

Using the KPIs from that embedded dashboard and a list of best practices/benchmarks from Kongregate, developers can quickly diagnose how their game is performing and make adjustments so the game can grow.

To streamline delivery, Kongregate built a dashboard template to collect vital data for all games. From that template, they simply filter analytics by game and deliver metrics to the developers of that game. That simple setup achieves all of Kongregate’s major goals while reducing the amount of setup work to a single filter selection. It also eliminates ongoing maintenance work.

This focus on important KPIs is an easy way for Kongregate to create a common data language among their developers. Once everyone is speaking the same language, Kongregate can communicate with their base of developers more directly. This process takes time, but it’s crucial to Kongregate’s strategy to nurture the developers to a state where they can turn data into growth.

Kongregate — a gaming company that serves independent game developers and player communities. Since 2013, Kongregate’s games have more than 200 million mobile installs and 16 million active users.

Problem Kongregate needed to deliver game data to help independent game developers with a range of analytics abilities improve their games.

Action By embedding a KPI dashboard in their developer backend, Kongregate set up a delivery system that presents fresh, interactive data inside the standard admin workflow.

Industry: GamingCustomer Since: 2013

Resolution Game developers combine their game analytics with Kongregate’s published best practices to independently determine tactics to improve their games.

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Game statistics A high-level view of game performance and player actions

Examples Daily revenue, Daily active users, Daily new players

Monetizations Insight into the way the game creates revenue from players

Examples Revenue per DAU, Item sales, Spender distribution)

Retention Tracks how players feel about the game over time

Examples Game ratings, Retention rate, User engagement)

Dashboards for Developers

Before delivering a dashboard to game developers, Kongregate sorts data into three categories. This information is how they develop a standardized way of analyzing and discussing game performance.

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Embedded Analytics with Periscope Data

If your company has chosen to look for an embedded analytics solution, Periscope Data can help. Check out our embedded analytics page to learn more about that product and even explore an embedded dashboard for yourself. If you want to learn more about Periscope Data or talk to one of our experts about how to build a more data-driven product management team, request a contact and we will reach out to you soon.

Deliver Insights Fast Integrate embedded charts and dashboards into your web page to deliver analytics to customers and partners within minutes.

Customize your brand experience using custom color themes and white labeling with just a few lines of code.

Powerful and Dynamic Reporting Embedded analytics give customers and partners access to fresh, incredibly interactive and dynamic reports, with reliable performance, even at high volumes of data.

End users can also explore data on their own using filters, pivot tables and drilldowns, reducing the need to rely on your support team.

Security Set expiration dates and apply filter sets to limit access to only the data they are supposed to see. Periscope’s Embed API also includes encryption to prevent end users from altering these settings.

In addition to being HIPAA-HITECH and SOC 2 Type 2 certified, Periscope Data performs a variety of audits to ensure ongoing compliance with industry standard best practices.

Interactive Dashboards Built into Your Product Engage and empower your customers and partners with interactive dashboards and charts they can explore on their own.

Embed into Everyday Applications Deliver actionable analytics into the everyday applications your business uses.

About Periscope DataPeriscope Data is an end-to-end BI and analytics platform for anyone looking to answer complex questions with data. Business professionals and data experts use Periscope Data every day to connect all of their data sources, then analyze, visualize and share insights. The platform offers the fastest time to insight, unmatched power and the flexibility to meet the demands of every part of the business. Periscope Data is trusted by more than 1,000 customers, including Adobe, Crunchbase, EY, Flexport and ZipRecruiter.

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