Platform Analytics

You don’t need to be a data science expert to make use of platform analytics to gain better insights into your business. From Google Analytics to deep-dive data analytics for your APIs, big data is your friend when it comes to understanding your company. The right analytics platform can open up your data in a user-friendly way that empowers you to fuel better-informed business decisions based on your performance, customer data, and analytics.

What Is an Analytics Platform?

An analytics platform is a platform that delivers a wide range of business analytics tools and functions to enable users to visualize and interact with the data. Platform analytics enables businesses to make more informed decisions underpinned by sound data science and actionable insights.

What Are Enterprise Analytics Platforms and What Do They Do?

A data analytics platform designed for enterprises will include tools designed to support the defining, tracking, and understanding of a business’s data. Combined with powerful web analytics, an enterprise platform will deliver a customer experience that lets businesses glean deep insights from their customer analytics. This can lead to enhanced decision-making, enabling businesses to flex and scale their strategies based on real-time usage of their products.

What Are the Features of Business Analytics Platforms?

There are various types of analytics platforms designed to meet a range of data analytic needs. Some platforms parse your data and give you insights into how your pipeline for day-to-day sales is progressing. Others are designed to provide analytics for companies that offer APIs as products, where the metrics will focus on providing insights into company performance so that businesses can:

• Track company growth
• Enrich user profiles
• Better understand who is using their APIs and how
• Identify trends
• Identify anomalies
• Spot opportunities for increased customer engagement
• Drive revenue growth

What Are the Key Elements of Embedded Analytics?

Embedded analytics refers to the delivery and presentation of analytics in a way that makes it more accessible to the user. It can apply to video analytics, API analytics, or any other platform analytics solution that delivers data in a way that is easy to visualize and interpret. Key to this is an intuitive user interface, clear visualization of the data, and easy integration with other business tools.

What Are the Major Platforms in Product Analytics?

Some of the most successful product analytics platforms (also commonly referred to as business intelligence platforms) are those that combine deep dive analytics tool sets with an impressive, user-friendly dashboard experience. Examples include Cognos Analytics, Microsoft Power BI, Qlik Sense, Klipfolio, Zoho Analytics, Domo, and SAP Analytics Cloud.

Also popular are dashboarding tools such as Tableau and Looker, highlighting the importance that users are placing on being able to visualize their analytics. After all, businesses don’t just need to track the right metrics — they need to analyze them in an easy-to-understand format in order to get the maximum benefit from them.

Benefits of an Analytics Platform

Data analytics can enable a business to harness the potential of big data. The key benefits of an analytics platform include a deeper understanding of the company’s products and how customers are using them, leading to better decision-making, product-led growth, and a data-driven strategic approach.

What Are the Advantages of an Analytics Platform?

Using big data analytics affords businesses multiple advantages in terms of leveraging their understanding of user behavior. Embedded analytics supports this through user-friendly data delivery. This is the key advantage of an analytics platform – it turns big data into something users can track, query, interrogate, and interpret to underpin solid decision-making via a more detailed understanding of the organization’s customers.

What Are the Advantages and Benefits of Business Analytics?

One advantage of business analytics is the ability to track and interrogate customer data in both macro and microformat, from looking at the business as a whole to drilling down into individual usage.

This kind of business intelligence delivers a wide range of advantages, from the ability to make major strategic decisions to early identification of customer issues. Data analytics can also help businesses identify monetization opportunities, increase sales, and achieve greater operational efficiency.

What Should I Look for in an Analytics Platform?

To choose an analytics platform that delivers everything you need, focus on:

• Ease of integration — will it work with your current setup, or does it lock you into using particular products? A data platform such as Moesif or Zoho — Analytics, for example, opens up plenty of options while avoiding vendor lock-in.
• Hidden costs — are essential features hidden behind a paywall?
• Ease of use — prioritize a superb dashboard experience.
• Ease of implementation — choose a platform that is easy and rapid to integrate, with a minimal learning curve.
• Security — not something to compromise on. Ever.

Also essential is that the platform provides a full analytics experience. That means delivering predictive analytics (forecasting), descriptive analytics (data mining), prescriptive analytics (optimization/simulation), and diagnostic analytics for maximum insights. This means you can track a wide range of key metrics, including time to first hello world, weekly active users, API retention rate, top customers by API usage, API calls by business transaction, conversion rate, and more.

What Competitive Advantage Can Businesses Reap from Data Analytics?

Businesses can use data analytics to enhance operational efficiency, driving faster time to value and to market. Platform analytics can also support flexible product development, leading to unique offerings based on customers’ precise needs and growing trends. This can provide a range of competitive advantages.

The evolution of augmented analytics, which uses artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language generation, and automation, is likely to provide even more competitive advantages in the future.

Enable Platform Analytics

There are different ways to enable platform analytics. Most companies opt for Software as a Service (SaaS) as the concept of an on-premises data lake becomes increasingly antiquated. Tools as diverse as Google Cloud, Google Analytics Power Platform (including the Power Platform admin portal), Power apps, and Moesif are enabling businesses to achieve everything in the cloud.

Using SaaS for analytics data delivers all the benefits discussed above in terms of data-driven decisions. It also brings costs down significantly compared to on-prem solutions. It does come with challenges though, such as ensuring data is secure and backed up appropriately. However, that’s where solutions such as Snowflake’s end-to-end encryption or Moesif’s secure proxy come in (where you can encrypt data both in transit and at rest, meeting HIPAA and SOC2 compliance requirements).

How To Integrate Data Into Your Analytics Platform

To stand up your chosen analytics platform, you need to enable your data to be piped into it. You can do this through a partner whose software you are using (usually with a single click), or you can integrate a provider’s software through an SDK. Both approaches result in your telemetry data being available for the SaaS analytics provider.

What Are the Enablers of Big Data Analytics?

To maximize your use of everything from tenant-level analytics to business-level data, use a platform analytics solution that is easy to set up and pipe your data across to.