15 Key Questions to Ask any Embedded Analytics Vendor

The decision of which embedded analytics solution to acquire is of strategic and financial importance to your organization, having a direct impact on business performance as well as employee or customer happiness. However, the field of embedded analytics is not short of complexities and, as such, it is often easy to overlook many of the underlying aspects that have the potential to start hampering your teams, your business, and ultimately, your ambitions.

How can you avoid these potential pitfalls?

By asking the right questions of any analytics vendors you approach in your pursuit of embedded analytics. Being armed with what to look for will enable you to invest in the right solution, thereby, increasing your potential for a successful analytics-powered product or application and, in turn, the potential to successfully grow your business.

Some of the questions you should be asking

This list of questions is intended to help your data, product, and management teams to evaluate various platforms smoothly and find an analytics solution that will satisfy your organization, use cases, and users, in the long term.

Advanced embedded analytics capabilities are especially crucial for software companies, enterprises, and large-scale, distributed organizations and use cases.

Wondering what some of the terms in this article mean?

• Non-technical users - users with no/limited skills in working with data analytics - e.g. business managers, sales reps., branch managers, accountants, etc.
• Visualizations - a broad term to describe graphs, tables, and other data depictions
• Dashboard - a collection of graphs, charts, tables, and other visualization types placed together within one page, for example.
• Metric - to simplify this term, for the purposes of this article, think of a metric as a piece of data/information displayed in a visualization.

Embedding dashboards into your application

• What options do I have to embed graphs, charts, and dashboards with your analytics platform?
• Is there any simple, do-it-yourself option of embedding for non-technical users?

Customizations for a consistent visual style

• What customization options are available to ensure a consistent visual style between your embedded analytics solution and my business application/software product?
• Can I make your analytics interface look totally different, unlike traditional analytics?

Data visualization for all users

• What types of visualizations are available right off?
• Can non-technical users easily create (or adjust preexisting) dashboards and graphs?

Scalability to 100s or 1000s of users/user groups

• What size of deployment is your analytics solution able to support? Does scaling to more users affect performance?
• How does pricing change with increased/decreased customer/user numbers?

Data preparation and change management

• What options are available for data preparation? Where does data preparation occur?
• What control mechanisms (semantic layers, reusable metrics, layered security) exist to ensure that visualizations do not give inaccurate or unreliable data outcomes?

Data integration from multiple sources

• What data sources are supported by your embedded analytics platform?
• Can users easily upload data themselves (via CSV, for example)?

Data security operations and compliance

• What are the security standards supported by your embedded analytics solution?
• Is your platform certified to handle highly sensitive healthcare/financial data?

Monetizing data and software products

• Does your embedded analytics solution enable the segmentation of customers by tiers, to develop a software product with priced tiers of data (for example, Basic, Advanced, Premium)?

This is just a selection of the most common questions to ask embedded analytics vendors. For the more technical questions, your team should be asking, continue to download our Embedded Analytics Questionnaire.

To learn more about the GoodData embedded analytics solution head to our embedded analytics page or, alternatively, request a demo and let our experts take you on a guided tour of the GoodData platform. It's commitment-free.