Embedded dashboards provide your customers, partners, and employees with self-service analytics to relevant data.

That's a competitive edge in a world where data drives business strategy.

But not all embedded dashboard solutions are built equal. 

You should first evaluate your options against some important functionalities to reap all the benefits of customer-facing analytics.

Modern embedded dashboard solutions are built on highly-scalable, cloud-native architectures that seamlessly connect to all the systems that make up a website, internal app, or product. 

It's vital to choose an embedded dashboard solution built upon a robust yet straightforward development platform, so your business can harness the power of data in its apps while ensuring a user-friendly experience. 

There are certain features you can't do without in an embedded dashboard solution. 

That's why we put together this list of must-haves, whether you're looking to embed visualizations and data into your internal applications or want to offer viewers a customer-facing dashboard. 

What is an Embedded Dashboard Solution?  

Embedded dashboards display data and analytics within an existing application, web portal, or customer-facing analytics environment. 

These solutions are helpful in adding value to your customer's end-users by distilling massive datasets into actionable information and showing this information in the tool context they use daily. 

Robust analytics and dashboards within your product also keep your user on the platform, providing higher customer satisfaction and retention. They're not jumping between apps to track down the data they need.

Embedded dashboards allow your customers to quickly accomplish what they want to do with data.

‎End users, or viewers, can access data and gain insights quickly and simply with the help of a solid embedded analytics approach. 

Some data that embedded dashboards display are the following:

• Workflow visualizations
• Personal notifications
• Business reports related to productivity, financials, or other key metrics.

A few must-have features for embedded dashboards: 

• A live, interactive experience.
• Enabling users to efficiently ask any question of their data and receive clear, up-to-date answers where they need them most
• Endless flexibility that allows users to cut and slice their data however they like to gain helpful insights

Let's dive deeper into the details of what an embedded dashboard brings to your analytics:

Flexible Embedding and Seamless Integration into Your Application

The right tool makes adding dashboards and visualizations to your website easy. Often it'll be as simple as creating the dashboard, exporting it for sharing, and adding an iframe or embed code to your website, then taking all the credit for the fantastic, data-driven insights you’re sharing with your customers. 

Explo features a style configurator that allows users to be flexible in styling their dashboard like your application —  fonts, colors, shadows, border styles, etc.

High-Level Security 

An embedded analytics dashboard should provide fine-grained control over what viewers can see and do, including limiting their ability to access and explore data for privacy and security reasons.

Access controls and security settings at the database, table, and row levels — along with one-time signed URLs — are essential security features.

A good embedded dashboard solution should maintain the highest data governance standards and support your specific multi- or single-tenant data model.

Dashboard Version Control

Embedded dashboards differ from internal dashboards because they're a part of your product. Because of this, your solution is as much a product development tool as a BI tool.

The ability to save new versions, push them to different environments, and revert changes, is a necessity. This functionality allows you to iterate on your dashboards, QA test them, and revert to older versions if needed.

Simple Embedding and Maintenance

A SaaS-based embedded analytics system needs the least resources for installation and upkeep. 

Purchasing hardware or installing, configuring, and maintaining software is unnecessary. An excellent feature of an embedded dashboard solution is being able to deploy to a live website with no code changes.

When creating or sharing BI, especially externally, engineering departments might become a bottleneck. 

‎

Look for a self-service BI solution that lessens the involvement of your engineering team to remove obstacles. The embedded platform should be simple for application developers to use. 

Dashboard development shouldn't require code changes, and the platform should offer lightweight and quick data modeling capabilities.

How Explo Can Help You  

Explo can help your business create beautiful, configurable, white-label dashboards that embed directly in your app. 

Take Goldcast, a San Francisco-based company that enables B2B companies and event marketers to host jaw-dropping virtual events:

Instead of taking months, Goldcast was able to use Explo to design and integrate dashboards with their product in days. Additionally, because updates and modifications can be made promptly, iterating on dashboards based on client feedback and requests is easier. 

Since they used Explo's drag-and-drop interface to build dashboards, Goldcast's developers could concentrate their bandwidth on other components of the events platform, saving countless dev hours. 

Due to Explo's adaptable design approach, Goldcast was able to integrate dashboards into their program smoothly. 

Keeping data and analytics inside the Goldcast platform added immediate value to the data and a seamless user experience — without the need to conduct separate analyses.

Read the full case study here.

‎

Takeaway    

B2B companies can reap considerable rewards from experimenting with embedded analytics dashboards that enable clients, partners, and staff to quickly and easily delve into their data to discover the answers they need. 

To fully benefit from what embedded analytics offers, you’ll need specific features in your analytics software, which is where Explo can help further.

Building and managing customer-facing dashboards is accessible with Explo. 

We can help your developers save time by simply copying a few lines of code to embed our pre-built interactive dashboards and reports directly into your web portal or application. 

Watch this brief demo to see what we can do for you.