Elevating Your Saas Company Using White-Label Analytics

Application providers, including SaaS companies and ISVs, can benefit from buying a white-label analytics tool to embed into their app instead of building from scratch. Embedding analytics requires white labeling capabilities, which take your user experience to the next level.

What is White Label Analytics?

White-label analytics refers to embedded analytics software that can be rebranded and customized to blend in seamlessly with the parent application. White-label analytics platforms offer both better usability and differentiation that will set you apart from the competition. In this article, we dive into what those capabilities are and why they matter, then list a few questions to ask to assess vendors’ white-label capabilities.

Why is White Label Analytics Important?

When you white-label embedded analytics software, you make your charts, reports, and dashboards look like a seamless part of your software instead of a third-party plugin. Additionally, entire apps can be white-labeled.

Relevant Software, an international software development company, writes, “White label apps are built in such a way that they can be easily branded and customized, allowing you to change colors, logos, and other elements to make them look unique to your brand.”

Benefits include:

• Enables easy branding and customization with your colors, logos, and other elements so it blends in with the SaaS application
• Allows companies to quickly go to market while minimizing investment
• Most importantly, the user experience is consistent

Relevant outlines an example of a company building a food delivery app that multiple restaurants can customize with their own branding. Each restaurant benefits from going to market quickly with a fully supported solution with minimal investment while maintaining focus on its core competency of hospitality. Additionally, the software development firm maximizes revenues by providing software to multiple customers.

In, “How to Select an Embedded Analytics Product,” author Wayne Eckerson writes about how BI tools have traditionally been used by only about one-quarter of the average organization. “Embedded analytics changes the equation. By inserting charts, dashboards, and entire authoring and administrative environments inside other applications, embedded analytics empowers business users with insights and dramatically increases BI adoption. The catch is that most business users don’t know they’re ‘using BI’—it’s just part of the application they already use. “

The best embedded analytics solutions are invisible to users. White labeling, also often referred to as “customization,” is an important attribute for many BI tools.

The Dresner Wisdom of Crowds® Business Intelligence Market Study rates vendors using a 33-criteria evaluation model, including “customization and extensibility,” within the category of “quality and usefulness of a product.”

The Benefits of White Label Analytics

A white-label dashboard platform increases user adoption and ease of use. With proper white labeling, you can deliver all the functionality of self-service analytics tools in a high-quality experience that fits your brand.

1. Maintain Brand

According to Vendasta, “The key to white labeling products is anonymity… Your brand gets all of the credibility, loyalty, and trust.” As a marketing professional, I’m a little biased on the relative importance of branding and reputation. However, I certainly recognize how vital the user experience is, and to maintain the user experience your team built, you must be able to fully white-label analytics within your SaaS application.

2. Consistent UX without Added Development

Product owners invest significant efforts into developing a user interface that’s easy to use, aesthetically pleasing, and visually consistent. To maintain these efforts, white-label embedded analytics software capabilities must be able to also maintain that same look and feel.

The capabilities of white label embedded analytics software affirm these efforts, without the need for your developers to rebuild significant components of the third-party analytics app. Such rebuilding would partially negate the value of purchasing a third-party white-label reporting tool.

3. Seamless Integration

You need responsive designs that automatically adapt to different screen sizes. Equally important is the ability for users to customize their experiences to display exactly the types of data they want, in the manner they want to see it. With white-label dashboard software, you can integrate seamlessly, increasing user engagement so your SaaS app becomes sticky as users rely on it.

The best analytics tools are invisible to users. White labeling, also often referred to as “customization,” is an important attribute for many BI tools for creating true white label reports.

The Dresner Wisdom of Crowds® Business Intelligence Market Study rates vendors using a 33-criteria evaluation model, including “customization and extensibility,” within the category of “quality and usefulness of product.”

What are Common Challenges with White Label Analytics?

Mr. Eckerson writes, “Most BI tools were not designed for embedding; converting a stand-alone, commercial product into one that can be easily embedded in both single- and multi-tenant environments with full fidelity is challenging.”

While many BI tools can embed dashboards and some can embed individual widgets (charts), the functionality fails to meet the needs of SaaS providers. For example, many traditional BI tools rely on iFrames for their embeds which offer little customization beyond logo swapping.

AWS Quicksight white label features are a good example as it only allows basic updates with iFrames embeds lacking the customization that a SaaS leader would expect. (See more about Qrvey vs Quicksight here) Others that do support JavaScript widgets, may lack customization options such as CSS overrides for a true white-label embedded analytics experience.

What Part of an Analytics Tool Can You White Label?

This will always vary by software. But the features that set you up for success include:

• logo
• header style (plays a big role in whether it blends into your app)
• chart color palettes
• fonts – type, sizes, color, and weights
• spacing inside certain charts – helpful when dealing with axis labels with long text

What Makes Good White Label Analytics?

When evaluating white labeling, Mr. Eckerson advises, “What parts of the user interface can you customize without coding? The best tools let you create a custom graphical interface that blends seamlessly with the host application without developer assistance. The less coding, the quicker the project deploys.“

What features of the tool can you customize without coding?

1) Here you’re looking for what elements are customizable.

• The basics: The most common are logos and color palettes used by charts. This is perhaps the most basic and where all solutions start.

  
  

• The canvas: Can you change the color of the canvas or dashboard background? If you use a light gray as the background for your SaaS app, you will want the same control of your reports.

  
  

• Style elements:

  • How about fonts: family, size, weights, and colors? Does it have defaults, or is it chart by chart?

  • How about widget elements such as borders and box shadows?

    
    

• Chart titles: Can you change the font styles? Can you hide it all together?

  
  

• Dark mode: A simple yet more complex customization. Does your solution have it?

2) How do you customize elements that can’t be configured with an interface?

Here, you’re asking how questions. Expect to hear a few answers, but ideally, you can create stylesheets or pass in overrides in the embed code. Everything should be programmatic in the embed code or as API parameters.

3) iFrames or javascript-based components for embedding?

iFrames make most engineering teams bang their head against their desk. iFrame solutions like Amazon QuickSight and Tableau make it the hardest to white-label given their lack of customization. What’s worse is when a business like SiSense has multiple products with different capabilities that may force you into using their iFrames. And some like Yellowfin, will offer both, but you’ll have to spend additional time vetting each method.

This is one of the biggest reasons we only use JavaScript for our embedded components. iFrames are simply too limiting to be useful in multi-tenant analytics use cases by SaaS companies.

Did you know Qrvey offers 65+ CSS style classes that teams use to seamlessly white-label Qrvey’s embedded analytics product? Check out some dashboard examples.

Choosing The Best White Label Analytics Platform

True white-label analytics software opens up the entire user experience to customization, including support for colors, fonts, chart and visualization attributes, and much more. By providing granular control, developers can ensure your analytics look perfect in all environments and on all devices.

Effective white label features also do not interfere with self-service analytic capabilities. Users are still able to fully customize their analytics and dashboards to suit their needs, they just do so within the parameters that you, as the software provider, have defined, ensuring that the look and feel of your software are always maintained.

Pro Tip*: Involve UX early in the process. You have a UX lead that will care deeply that any third-party software can maintain the user experience they have thoughtfully created.*

Implementing White-Label Analytics

Implementing a white-label analytics platform doesn’t have to be a cumbersome process that will slow down your software development or analytics implementation. If you’ve selected a customizable option like Qrvey, your developers can simply use the native styling tools to create white-label dashboards that match your brand and the rest of your application.

Once set up initially, most white-label embedded platform settings will not need to be adjusted later on as additional analytics are deployed throughout your software. Check out our data visualization examples to see how white-label analytics software could function for you.

Want To Learn More?

Qrvey is the leading embedded analytics for SaaS solutions, offering an analytics solution built for embedded and white label use cases exclusively for SaaS companies that want to offer self-service analytics using their own data.

At Qrvey, we certainly advocate to SaaS providers using our embedded analytics, but we also understand that your customers are using your tools. In most cases, they have no idea that the interactive dashboards and reports were built by Qrvey – and that’s exactly as it should be. Learn about why SaaS companies rely on Qrvey to power better analytics experiences.

Sign up for a demo today to learn more. We’ll get you set up with a free trial, and you can try our white label analytics features yourself.