9 Reasons NOT To Build Your Own Analytics

As a software company, you already know the value of data and analytics for your business. The more insights and analytics you add to your products, the stickier they become with your customers.

The decision then becomes whether to buy or build your own software for embedded analytics. Fortunately, the right decision for software providers is the obvious one.

Here are nine reasons why you should NOT build your own analytics.

#1 You’ll Always Be Playing Catch-Up

It doesn’t matter how many talented developers you have or how much money you’re willing to spend, building your own analytics just isn’t practical. You’ll be playing catch-up from the day you begin and will only continue to fall behind. Your customers are smart. They have high expectations. And they’ll demand a lot more than your in-house team is able to deliver.  

#2 The Opportunity Costs Are Too High

Every man-hour you spend adding analytics to your software is an hour not spent staying ahead of your competition. Analytics are not your core competency, which means adding analytics will take you longer than you expect. It will also put a drag on your entire product roadmap as valuable resources are slowly siphoned away.

#3 Embedded Analytics Can Be Monetized

Many software companies have already learned that customers are willing to pay up for robust analytics capabilities. By choosing an embedded analytics provider, you can quickly offer a complete analytics add-on or upgrade, or even a stand-alone analytics product, that will boost your margins while increasing customer satisfaction at the same time.

See the Top 3 Ways Software Companies Can Monetize Their Data.

#4 Building Is More Expensive Than You Think

Product managers often forget that adding in-house analytics costs a lot more than just the initial development time and resources. Everything you build today will need to be tested, deployed and maintained with every product release going forward.

Your analytics will need to remain in sync with your data, often requiring extensive data preparation and testing. Then there are also training and support costs, as customers discover bugs and request new features and functionality.

#5 Analytics Is More Than Just Charts

To build the analytics solution your customers expect, you’ll need to build a lot more than just simple, static charts. Your customers will be looking for advanced features like sorting, filtering, bucketing and drill-downs, just to name a few. But they want self-service analytics features most importantly.

All of these features are table stakes for any embedded analytics platform, but they’ll cost you considerable development time to build by yourself.

#6 Charting Libraries Don’t Upgrade Themselves

As part of your in-house analytics solution, you’ll inevitably rely on charting libraries and other third-party components to get the job done. All of these components will require regular maintenance and upgrades that will add even more to #4 above. 

#7 Don’t Forget About All Those Devices

Your in-house analytics may look great on your laptop, but what about on mobile devices? Building mobile-responsive analytics involves a lot more than just scaling down your charts to fit a smaller screen.

Often the data must be regrouped and redrawn to provide a different picture from the one that was being shown on the desktop. Certain functionality must also be removed on smaller devices to enhance the user experience. In short, making your analytics functional on every device is a lot of work.  

#8 Analytics Must Be Actionable

Providing analytics to your users is really only the first step in the analytics process. In order for analytics to become truly useful and engaging for your users, they must be actionable. Users not only want the ability to drill down and learn more, but they also need the ability to create metrics and thresholds. This enables alerts and notifications and data-driven workflow automation. Adding these actions to your in-house analytics dramatically increases the scope of your project. 

#9 Your Customers Will Always Want More

One of the biggest benefits of an embedded analytics solution is that embedded analytics were built to support thousands of users, all with varying wants, needs and skill levels. Building a solution yourself means that all of these feature requests, enhancements and needs will fall onto your development team, creating an endless loop of unmet desires.  

Fortunately, There’s a Better Way

The best embedded analytics platforms like Qrvey offer software providers the quickest and most cost-effective route to adding world-class analytics to their products.

At Qrvey, our goal is to enable software developments to build less software and deliver more value to customers.

See what’s possible with Qrvey’s embedded analytics for SaaS companies. 

Embedded Analytics – Build vs Buy

As a software company, you already know the value of data and analytics for your business. The decision is whether to build your own in-house analytics or invest in an analytics platform that can be easily embedded into your software. Fortunately, the right decision for software providers is the obvious one.

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