Our first three articles on embedded analytics define the concept, explore the types of organizations that leverage it, and provide technical documentation on how to embed Power BI into your website (basic) or application (advanced). This fourth and final installment provides real-life examples of embedded analytics in action—concluding our blog series with a holistic look at the technology and its prevalence in our daily lives.
A basic embedded analytics implementation is the easiest way to integrate analytics, rendering reports in websites with the simple copy and paste of an embed code. Due to the ease with which a report can be embedded into a website, blog, or news article, there are examples of basic embedded analytics on the public websites we interact with on a daily basis.
For example, the online real-estate company Zillow provides a market value line graph on all housing listings.
The visual includes functionality that updates the displayed home value as the user navigates across the years listed on the x-axis. It’s a tangible example of an embedded graph that allows end users to instantly perceive and interact with how a home’s value has changed over time.
Even news institutions like the New York Times embed reports in their online articles. The Times’ website currently includes visuals that highlight Coronavirus cases, tests, hospitalizations, and more. These reports are interactive and can be filtered by location and date range.
As our data-driven culture continues to grow, the use of reporting on public websites is becoming increasingly common; more than likely you have interacted with similar visualizations without realizing they constitute basic embedded analytics.
For content creators who may not have been considered data-savvy in the past, this type of analytics implementation reinforces what’s being conveyed in written word—providing readers with a visual representation that our brains can interpret more quickly than text.
Advanced embedded analytics implementations consist of fully integrating a business intelligence (BI) solution into a third-party product or web portal. This is most commonly done by software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies who have a core application that lacks native reporting functionality. Rather than build an entire analytics solution in house, a SaaS organization can partner with an analytics vendor that sells this software - embedding the vendor’s technology within their native SaaS product.
From a technical perspective, advanced embedded analytics implementations require software engineering but offer more robust functionality than basic implementations like advanced filtering, row-level data permissioning, near real-time data computation, and report scheduling.
Many of Numerro’s partners leverage advanced embedded analytics, including Vsimple, a SaaS provider that embeds Power BI dashboards within their web application.
Vsimple's subscribers are able to click the ‘Dashboard’ tab on the left hand navigation and have a comprehensive analytics dashboard rendered in real-time, highlighting important data that customers are able to leverage within their native product.
The seamless integration between the two products allows users to access analytics without having to navigate between multiple systems or even know that the dashboard was created in Power BI’s entirely separate application.
There are many different use cases and ways in which analytics can be embedded and, as data continues to become increasingly available, these examples will only become more pervasive online and within the software applications we use every day.
Whether basic or advanced, embedded analytics makes data more accessible to nontechnical end-users who also benefit from report-based insights—allowing us to make more informed decisions at work and within our daily lives.
We hope you enjoyed this final part of our embed series. If you have any questions about embedding Numerro components in your application, don’t hesitate to reach out. We’d love to work with you.