The Value of Embedded Analytics for Your Agency and Your Customers

Technology is no longer the “future of business.” It is very much the here and now, with stuff like AI and big data entering mainstream use in a wide variety of industries in the past decade.

Embedded analytics, also called white-label analytics, is another avenue that businesses can tap into to maximize their revenue and client retention. It’s a technology that has recently become more accessible, with brands big and small starting to use it to improve their products and customer experience.

In this article, let’s break down what white-label analytics is and how you can leverage it to improve your internal business operations and better serve your clients.

What is White Label Analytics?

Providing your clients with compelling data reports and showcasing success for your activities — whether you’re doing them in-house or outsourcing — is vital to ensure client satisfaction and minimize churn for your agency.

White label analytics, also called white label business intelligence (BI), is a subset of embedded analytics. This refers to the process of offering rich data reporting to your clients through third-party BI solutions while maintaining the consistency of your brand image.

That is, a white label analytics tool can be rebranded and its appearance configured so it can be visually integrated with your brand. This means you’re using an external tool to do the reporting for you but can brand the report as your own. Your clients will feel as if it has come directly from your agency and not some third-party plugin.

The analytics capabilities include reporting, dashboard building, and various data visualization forms (charts, graphs, etc.).

This has use cases for various business types (such as SaaS, enterprise eCommerce, etc.). For agencies, in particular, it allows your team to gain comprehensive insights and make quicker and better decisions while also sharing the data effortlessly with clients.

Here’s what to look for in a white label embedded analytics solution:

• Easy integration: A key factor in deciding your white label analytics solution is seamless integration. If the tool doesn’t integrate well, some of its biggest functionalities can go unused.
• API capabilities: The solution you pick must have extensive API capabilities that enable complete control over your client’s reporting, along with intuitive dashboard management directly from the tool. It should also offer other core features like embedded visualizations, single sign-on (SSO), user roles & permissions, and two-way interactions.
• Scalability: The analytics solution must have a flexible framework that scales with your business to handle more intensive usage.
• Security: This is a vital concern, and whichever platform you choose should have the latest cybersecurity standards and protocols in place. Avoid tools with outdated security practices or ones with zero-day vulnerabilities.
• Intuitive design: Ideally, your white label analytics tool should have a clean and easy-to-use interface with a little-to-no learning curve. The vendor should also offer some basic learning material in the form of blog posts and videos.
• Excellent customer support: Excellent multichannel technical customer support with quick response times in troubleshooting is also an essential factor to consider.

Furthermore, 62.7% of cloud providers don’t specify if data is owned by the business or shared, which results in a legal grey area where the provider could claim or abdicate ownership of all your client data.

And so, make sure the vendor has simple yet comprehensive contracts and SLAs that detail exactly what you’re getting with your white label software. Verify policies about data ownership and data protection and what happens to the data if you end your subscription.

With the concept of white label analytics clear, let’s understand how it’s valuable for your agency and clients.

The Pros of White Label Analytics

A customizable embedded analytics tool can contribute significantly to optimizing your agency’s front and back-end operations. With analytics reports aligning to your branding, white-label analytics allows you to tout your reporting capabilities to clients without ever having to acknowledge third-party involvement.

You don’t have to expend resources on building your analytics module while still ensuring the embedded solution appears to be an integrated part of your core offerings.

Not to mention white label analytics also helps improve your employee experience by providing user-friendly dashboards with multiple means of tweaking, visualizing, and working with data.

Let’s look at four great ways white label analytics helps optimize your internal workflows and solidify your client loyalty.

1. Build Predictive Models

Suppose your agency is accountable to an external body such as a board of directors or investors. In that case, the highly customizable and comprehensive reports derived from a white label analytics solution can be extremely valuable.

You can use predictive analytics to fuse your historical data with other relevant data points to visually demonstrate your work’s impact and figure out optimal strategies and potential investment areas.

You can easily share your analytics reports with the board members as a fully branded presentation and thus increase their overall confidence in your team.

2. Make the Best Use of Data

A white label analytics tool empowers you to merge data from multiple sources and delight clients.

For example, as a marketing agency, you can leverage a white label embedded analytics dashboard to show clients derived metrics from various data points, such as:

• Google Analytics, Search Console, Ads, etc.
• Email marketing software like MailChimp, Constant Contact, etc.
• Social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
• Facebook and Instagram ads.

In doing so, you empower your clients to easily track their online marketing performance and collaborate with you on strategy, as all the data is conveniently available in front of them.

You can also use dashboards for internal monitoring of client accounts. And with a simple link, you can let your clients see exactly what’s happening to their business accounts.
Plus, you can use dynamic charts on your website — say, an indicator for the boost in sales you generated for your clients or the number of visitors or social shares your agency blog is garnering — allowing you to strut your stuff as an agency.

3. Offer The Best Customer Experience

If you are part of an agency or consulting firm, you should already know of the need for outstanding customer experience. And here are a few key stats to prove that:

• According to Deloitte, 88% of companies now prioritize customer experience and see CX as a focus for 2021-2022.

• Gartner tells us that over 2/3 of businesses now compete primarily on customer experience.

• PcW states that 77% of clients expect on-demand services (up from 31% in 2018).

You can find more customer experience stats in this post, but you probably get the point. With 9 out of 10 businesses competing mainly on customer experience, it’s the organizations that take customer experience seriously that will stand out from the noise and win and keep loyal customers.

If you are not deploying automated and on-demand reporting for your consulting and agency customers, you will lose those customers.

4. Paint a Consistent Brand Image

When using an embedded analytics solution, perfect white labeling should be your top priority. Anything that deviates from your agency’s brand image, no matter how slight, can prompt clients to question the value of your services.

So, your goal is to render a consistent experience for your clients. A good white label analytics tool matches your fonts, colors, and style, so clients never notice they interact with something designed by a different company. Your team can tailor every facet of the analytics solution, such as:

• Colors: Humans are visual creatures, and you can usually recall renowned brands just by the colors they use in their logos and assets. With white labeling, you ensure clients get a familiar experience.
• Fonts and voice: Similar to colors and hues, you associate particular fonts with a specific brand. So inconsistency in the font (size, style, etc.) can be jarring for clients. Your unique voice (choice of words and style of communication) must be preserved, all of which is easily possible with a white label solution.
• Cross-platform consistency: A white label solution enables a consistent brand experience regardless of the device — desktop, mobile, or tablet.

In essence, successful white labeling is all about enabling clients to focus on your services’ value rather than getting distracted by branding inconsistencies.

Each analytics provider allows different flexibility levels for rebranding, from basic logo and color modifications to the ability to access the CSS and HTML of the tool to alter fonts, create custom actions, and design pixel-perfect dashboards.

5. Premium Reporting Offering To Expand Your Revenue

The best thing about white label analytics is that you can make it your own BI solution. You can use and sell it any way you want to your customers.

Many marketing agencies and consulting firms offer canned or standardized reports to their clients as part as their consulting services. This entry level of reporting is a great way to offer your customers the ability to check their KPIs and the results of their campaigns on-demand.

But you can also decide to take a step further and offer Premium or Advanced reporting to your customers, which you can charge them for.

Here’s a testimonial of a Customer Data Platform vendor based out of Europe which also provides consulting services and data visualization tools to their customers:

Now, including advanced data visualization and analytics in your offering will show your prospects and customers that you’re actually going beyond what they first expected of you.

Conclusion

Capturing data from various sources and presenting it in an appealing and cogent way that conveys your efforts’ success is crucial.

A white-label analytics tool takes that burden off your plate, allowing you to focus on your core competency in delivering consistently outstanding work — not spending time or human resources in creating detailed reports on the results achieved for your clients.

And while it’s possible to do all the reporting and visualizations in-house (without a white label tool), in most cases, it’s not a good idea considering the cost and time savings you achieve from a third-party solution.

Building your own tool and doing all the reporting yourself only makes sense if the cost to hire in-house analytics is lower than subscribing to a tool to manage the volume of campaigns you run, or if your branding or report design needs are so intricate that no tool does the trick for you.

To sum up — from having the ability to customize your reports and build predictive models to making the best use of data and maintaining a uniform brand image — adopting a white-label analytics dashboard like ClicData can go a long way in boosting your client satisfaction and retention. Discover ClicData’s white label features and capabilities, or give us a call to see how we can help you improve your customer experience.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to leverage embedded analytics for your firm and customers, you can watch this webinar on-demand:

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About the author

Zoe is a content marketing strategist for SaaS brands like FollowUpBoss, Mention.com and more. Bylines: Ecwid, ProProfs, Score, etc. On the personal front, Zoe is a pho enthusiast and loves traveling around the world as a digital nomad.