2026 Guide to Embedding Analytics That Fits Your Product
If you're looking to embed an analytics solution into your software product in 2021, it’s important that you don’t just think about the short-term. Take a long-term perspective and think about these three key criteria to find the best fit solution for your business.
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#1 - Product Fit
When it comes to embedded analytics, most people just look at the product and whether they like it and if it does what they want it to. This technical fit is obviously important, but often people don’t look beyond that and think about how it future proofs their product. The vast majority of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) that approach us look for a dashboard solution. While the product has to meet your core need, consider whether it will enable you to provide a greater number of use cases to your end users beyond that. The challenge here is that people who are experts in their own domain are not necessarily experts in analytics, so they don't know what they don't know. If their customers are enterprise users who have experience with enterprise analytics solutions, they'll have a much broader range of use cases in their mind. We find asking a broad set of questions to peel back the layers often uncovers new use cases that a customer has not previously considered.#2- Commercial Fit
There are two primary reasons most embed analytics - to grow your business and accelerate sales or as a defensive move to protect market share by offering more value to your customers. In both cases, there's a commercial model that makes sense. If you’re looking to scale, you don't want to sign up to a commercial relationship that looks like good value today but is completely unaffordable in a few years time once your business has grown. You could find yourself needing a huge amount of resources or paying far more money for your analytics than originally anticipated. Whereas if your move is defensive, you will want to manage the cost of the solution while continuing to create and deliver value to your customers. In either case, you should look for a commercial model that will allow you to take full advantage of all the innovations that the vendor is creating over its lifetime. Some vendors purposely exclude future innovations from current contracts because that becomes their future upsell. So, you need to go into the commercial arrangement with eyes wide open. Don’t just think about the relationship that you have today, but the commercial relationship that you anticipate you'll need in four or five years time as your business scales or as your competitors move.
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