How modern products use embedded analytics to engage their users and keep them coming back
Data is so ubiquitous, we are sometimes oblivious to just how much of it we interact with — and how many companies are making it a core part of their product. Whether you’re aware of it or not, product leaders across industries are using data to drive engagement and prove value to their end-users. From Fitbit and Medium to Spotify and Slack, data is being leveraged not just for internal decision-making, but as an external product offering and differentiator.
These data-as-product features, often displayed as user-facing dashboards, are known as embedded analytics, white-label analytics, or native analytics, because they are offered natively within the context of the customer experience. We’ve gathered 25 examples of native analytics in modern software to highlight their power and hopefully inspire their further adoption.
Ahrefs Lets Website Owners Drill Down on Referrers
Every day, Ahrefs crawls 4 billion web pages, delivering a dense but digestible array of actionable insights from 12 trillion known links to website owners (and competitors), including referrers, social mentions, keyword searches, and a variety of site rankings.
AirBnB Helps Hosts Improve their Ratings and Revenue
In addition to providing intimate housing options in 161 countries to 60M+ guests, Airbnb also reminds its more than 600,000 hosts of the fruits of their labors — with earnings reports — and gently nudges them to provide positive guest experiences — with response rates and guest ratings.
Etsy Helps Build Dream Businesses
The go-to online shop Etsy, which boasts 35M+ products, provides its 1.5M+ sellers with engagement and sales data to help them turn their passion into the business of their dreams.
Eventbrite Alerts Organizers to Sales and Check-ins
Event organizers use Eventbrite to process 4M tickets a month to 2M events in 187 countries. They also turn to Eventbrite for real-time information, to stay up to date with ticket sales and revenue, to track day-of check-ins, and to understand how to better serve and connect with their attendees.
Facebook Expands Reach of Paid Services
With Facebook striving to take a bigger bite out of Google’s share of online ad sales, its strategic use of data has spread beyond the already robust Facebook Ads Manager to comprehensive metrics for Pages, including, of course, key opportunities to “boost” posts.
Fitbit Helps Users Reach Their Fitness Goals
Fitbit’s robust app, connected to any of its eight activity trackers, allows its 17M+ worldwide active users to track steps, distance, and active minutes to help them stay fit; track weight change, calories, and water intake to stay on pace with weight goals; and track sleep stats to help improve energy levels.
GitHub Tracks Evolving Code Bases
GitHub, the world’s largest host of source code with 35M+ repositories, allows its 14M+ users to gain visibility into their evolving code bases by tracking clones, views, visitors, commits, weekly additions and deletions, and team member activity.
Intercom Targets Tools — and Data — to Users’ Needs
Intercom, the “simple, personal, fun” customer communications platform, delivers targeted data-driven insights depending on which of the platform’s three products a team uses: Acquire tracks open, click, and reply rates; Engage tracks user profiles and activity stats; and Resolve tracks conversations, replies, and response times.
Jawbone UP Enables Ecosystem of Fitness Apps with Open API
Jawbone’s four UP trackers helps users hit fitness goals by providing insights related to heart rate, meals, mood, sleep, and physical activity both in its award-winning app, and through an extensive ecosystem of apps that draw data from the platform’s open API.
LinkedIn Premium Tracks Funnel Conversions
LinkedIn’s Premium suite of networking and brand-building tools helps demonstrate the ROI of sponsored campaigns by providing users with visibility into their engagement funnel — from impression, to click, to interaction, to acquired follower.
Medium Provides Publishers with Key Reader Metrics
Though Medium’s model is sometimes murky — publishing platform, publication, or social network? — it provides clear insights to its writers (or is that publishers?) in the form of views, reads, recommends, and referrers for published stories.
Mint Helps Users Budget and Save
Mint encourages users make better finance decisions and save up for big goals by giving them visibility into their spending trends, especially as they relate to personalized budgets.
Pinterest Allows Pinners to Track Engagement
The internet’s favorite mood board, Pinterest provides it 110M monthly active users with traffic and engagement stats including repins, impressions, reach, and clicks.
Pixlee TurnTo Illuminates Its Unique Value Proposition
Pixlee TurnTo helps brands build authentic marketing by making it easy to discover images shared by their customers, and then deploy them in digital campaigns. To help its clients understand the impact of this unique value proposition, Pixlee TurnTo uses native analytics to serve up an on-brand, real-time dashboard that presents custom metrics like “lightbox engagement” alongside traditional metrics like pageviews and conversions.
Shopkeep Improves Business Decision Making
Shopkeep’s all-in-one point-of-sale platform uses a wide range of data — from best-selling items to top-performing staff — to helps businesses make fact-based decisions that improve their bottom line.
Slack Delivers Visibility Into Internal Communications
The messaging app of choice for more than 60,000 teams — including 77 of the Fortune 100 companies — Slack delivers stats related to message frequency, type, and amount, plus storage and integrations.
Spotify Shares Stats as Stunning Visuals
Spotify’s stream-anywhere music service turns data insights into beautiful, bold visuals, informing their listeners of how many hours of songs they listened to in a year and ranking most-listened-to artists. They also help artists get the most from the platform by highlighting listeners by location and discovery sources.
Fan insights by Spotify
Square Zeros In On Peak Hours and Favorite Items
Going beyond credit card payments to comprehensive business solutions, Square provides business owners with real-time reports that include hourly sales by location, which help them hone in on peak hours and preferred products.
Strava Turns Everyday Activities Into Global Competitions
Strava turns everyday activities into athletic challenges by comparing its users’ performance stats against the community’s for a given walk, run, or ride. The app also used its 136B data points to create the Strava Insights microsite, providing insight into cycling trends in its 12 cities across the globe.
Swarm Updates the Foursquare Experience with New Gamified Features
Swarm adds additional gamification and social features to the original Foursquare check-in experience, providing users with their popular check-ins broken out by type, as well as friend rankings and leaderboards for nationwide “challenges.”
Triptease Builds Strong Relationships with Hotels
The Triptease smart widget allows hotels to display real-time prices for rooms listed by competing sites like Hotels.com to help convince guests to book directly and help the hotel build richer customer relationships. To keep a strong relationship with their own hotel-users, Triptease uses native analytics to show the impact on revenue of widget-enabled conversions, as well as the hotel’s real-time price rankings compared to other websites.
Twitter Beefs Up Its Business Case
As the internet’s 140-character collective consciousness positions itself more decisively as a boon for businesses, it has beefed up and beautified its analytics dashboard. Twitter’s dashboard now includes impressions, profile visits, mentions, and follower change for the past month, plus cards for Top Tweet, Top Follower, and Top Mention.
Vimeo Provides “Power” Stats in a Straightforward Interface
“We basically wanted to give users a power tool, but didn’t want them to feel like they needed a license to operate it,” explains Vimeo senior product designer Anthony Irwin of the video-hosting platform’s analytics tool. Today, Vimeo’s 100M+ users can dig deep — or stay high-level — on traffic, engagement, and viewer demographics.
Yelp Extrapolates Conversion-Generated Revenue
More than a ratings site for local businesses, Yelp also helps its 2.8M businesses engage and grow relationships with their customers. To highlight this value proposition, the company provides business users with a tally’s of customer leads generated through the platform, as well as a calculation of estimated related revenue.
Zype Helps Users Track Video Revenue
With a single interface, Zype makes it easy to publish and monetize video content across various platforms. Core to its value is the ability to provide users with key stats including monthly earnings, new subscriptions, and successful revenue models.
Want to see your stats featured in our next post? Send us a note
Building analytics into your product? We can help with that! Check out Native Analytics.
Originally published at keen.io.
