Embedded Charts: Types, Examples, and Tools

No matter how often you tell your team members that data is important and they need to use it daily in their jobs, it’s hard to change habits and workflows. Getting data is one of those tasks that adds multiple steps and 30-minute delays. Even though it can be useful, why would your team want to stop their work to look at it?

They shouldn’t have to. They don’t have to. That’s the beauty of embedded charts: You’re embedding a critical piece of your business intelligence (BI) right into their workflow. This way, team members and stakeholders have access to the data they need to drive their daily tasks right when they’re doing them.

What is an embedded chart?

An embedded chart is an automatically updating-and-refreshing chart that’s embedded into an application like a website, CRM tool, cloud application, mobile app, or anywhere your team does work and needs data. These embedded charts are highly customized to their specific context and often provide the data a single team or person needs to make data-driven decisions without opening another window or tool.

With these two characteristics in mind, embedded charts become extremely useful across industries and use cases.

What are embedded charts used for?

Here are a few common ways teams use embedded charts to further data-driven decision-making at all organizational levels.

• Marketing. Your marketing team can have a dashboard showing their current campaign performance across platforms and outlets right where they’re building their next campaign.
• Sales. With embedded charts showing current sales trends, market performance, and territory data embedded into a CRM tool, your sales team has all the data it needs to develop data-driven plans.
• Customer support. Embedded charts can be used within ticket management platforms to track historical averages on customer support KPI.
• Retail sales. With embeddable charts included in mobile apps for checking floor inventory.
• Finance. Embedded charts in Excel or other tools help your finance teams see exactly what data will help keep the company growing.

These examples show how embedded charts can benefit your teams across job functions, industries, and roles.

What are the elements of an embedded chart?

Embedded charts are visual tools that simplify the process of analyzing data by presenting it right in your viewers’ workflows in a clear, graphical format.

Components of an embedded chart:

• Title: The title of the chart helps provide context for the data.
• Axes: The x-axis and y-axis display the variables being measured.
• Legends: The legend identifies what different colors, shapes, lines, or line styles represent in the chart.
• Labels: Labels provide context by describing what the axes, data points, or sections of the chart represent.

Choosing the right chart type

When you’re choosing to embed a chart in a user’s workflow, it’s important to think about context. Embedded charts help employees complete tasks with the right data and information.

Embedded charts are put directly into an employee’s workflow. This means the employee isn’t necessarily visiting a page or application to view, explore, and engage with the data. The beauty of embedded charts is that they can do that as part of their work process, but they’re usually in a tool or application to do another task related to their job. The chart is supposed to help employees complete the task with the right data and information to make an informed decision. Choosing which chart type to embed should help enable the decision-making process.

Select chart types that are easily digested and understood. Don’t make users dig for critical information or make the chart so complex and full of data that it takes a long time to load. Find the critical information employees need to make the best decisions based on the data and display it as the simplest and easiest way to consume it. That way, your embedded charts feel like a natural process to improve their decision-making rather than adding another complicated step or creating so much additional work that users ignore it.

What to look for in an embedded chart tool

If you feel that embedded charts will improve your current workflows and enhance data-driven decision-making across your organization, a natural next step is to consider how best to implement them.

You’re most likely not going to find a reliable, standalone tool for embedding charts in other tools. For most companies, your best option will be a data or BI platform with embedded analytics as an important feature. For example, if you already use Power BI, you’ll likely have easy options for activating embedded charts in Excel, since both are owned by Microsoft.

Other data tools, like Domo, support the entire data lifecycle and have many features for seamless data sharing. When considering current or future data needs, make sure you understand your current or prospective tool’s embedded analytics capabilities and what your company needs from them.

Here are some specific things to consider about embedded charts when you’re evaluating tools:

• Ease of use. If you have enough programming knowledge, you probably have someone who could embed a chart in a lot of different places with enough time and effort. But most of your users likely aren’t technical geniuses and just need the data where they can see it. So, look for tools that make it easy for non-technical users to deploy such as copy and paste options for deploying embedded charts and easy ways to connect data sources and the end-view solutions.
• White label. Make sure your embedded analytics fit in seamlessly wherever you share them. Ensure you can customize your charts to match style and branding guidelines.
• Cost. Look at the current cost of deploying embedded analytics and the future costs of maintaining your embedded charts. If you’re sharing analytics outside of the BI tool, it can reduce your costs because you don’t need to buy individual seats or licenses for every person benefiting from the data. But make sure you understand what it will cost to regularly keep these embedded charts updated and functional across platforms.
• Flexibility. Not every tool will allow your team to customize what data can be shared in embedded charts. Look at the pre-built functionality for embedded analytics and how much your team will need to customize the embedded charts to ensure they’re actually helpful and engaging for your viewers.
• Connection. While not directly related to embedding charts in other platforms, consider what your tool will offer in terms of data connectivity. Your embeddable charts will only be helpful if they’re able to share the right data at the right moments, so make sure you can bring in all the data sources you need to give viewers the comprehensive view they need to make informed decisions.
• Security. Your data is still your data and you need to make sure it’s protected no matter where you share it. Look for tools that have robust security features that will give your team visualization into how and where data is shared, no matter where you’re using embedded charts.

Moving forward, your teams will be able to transform their roles and your business to one that uses data to make the best decisions every time a decision is made. Choosing the right tool to support that journey will ensure everyone in your company is empowered to build on data in their roles.

Domo will help your company achieve these goals. Utilizing Domo’s suite of tools supporting the entire data lifecycle, your company can ensure you’re bringing in the right data and sharing it with the right people to make informed decisions at every stage of your business.

Learn more about Domo and how it can help you create embedded charts that will drive your business forward.

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