The embedded analytics market is expected to be $77.52 billion by 2026, an enormous growth of 13.6% considering that the estimation for 2021 was $40.98 billion. While there is a lot of room for industry growth and embedded analytics tools will improve over time, today’s solutions rarely meet the needs of customer-facing SaaS analytics dashboards. Most engineering teams that Verb speaks with, plan to custom-build their products’ customer analytics dashboards, and our goal is to create a solution so they don’t have to custom-build dashboards. Verb is tackling embedded analytics problems from a unique perspective, and we’ve identified a few core issues as to why today’s embedded analytics solutions simply don’t work for a SaaS platform.
This is our list of the pitfalls when implementing embedded analytics for SaaS software.
Limited Design and Customization
A SaaS dashboard should align with a company’s site to create uniformity and ease transitions, processes and research. However, embedded analytics often lack the ability to control styles which is key for a better experience. Although design flexibility can be limited, the available features and dashboard design out there still make for understandable and usable data.
Burdening Your Users
Asking users to build their own charts and dashboards sounds like a good idea at first, but most users will never actually spend the time to do this. It’s better if your product provides some level of a predefined foundation, especially when data is supposed to reach every department in a business.
Lack of Actionable Insights
As ironic as it may sound, most embedded analytics tools don’t provide actionable options, although a SaaS dashboard should be actionable. Actionable data allows customers to use dashboards as a launching point to take action. For example, clicking on a bar in a bar chart that navigates users to another section of the product to manage information that was displayed.
Punitive Pricing
Charging for each user that can view a dashboard quickly increases the cost of using embedded analytics in SaaS platforms. Unfortunately, as a SaaS customer adds more users to their plan the more expensive it becomes to provide everyone with analytics.
Performance Management
One of the most common issues with any analytics dashboards (embedded or not) is that they take too long to load. When a dashboard is inside of a product, and customers use it as part of the product experience, a slow dashboard reflects poorly on the entire product and can have detrimental impacts on product performance. Most embedded analytics solutions rely on the customer to prepare and query their data, and if they support these features, it’s rarely optimized to handle multi-tenant data sources.
The lack of customization, pricing, actionable options, massive time consumption, and insufficient management processes are why so many SaaS companies try to custom-build their own dashboards. Yet, these projects often become a larger investment than teams expect or can afford. To help reduce costs and employ an effective solution, companies are turning to Verb Data. Find your SaaS-built solution and learn the reasons for it here.