Embedded Charts: Types, Examples, and Tools

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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.

There are two critical features of embedded charts: 

  1. Embedded charts are live and automatically refreshed. They aren’t static images of last month’s data. 
  2. They live somewhere outside of your traditional BI or visualization 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. If they have data on open rates for previous email campaigns in front of them while they’re building a new campaign, they’ll be able to seamlessly and intuitively integrate data into their process to improve performance. 
  • Sales. With embedded charts showing current sales trends, market performance, and territory data embedded into a customer relationship manager (CRM) tool, your sales team has all the data it needs to develop data-driven plans on where to focus targeting and prospecting efforts. Using data to understand which prospects are most likely to answer the phone will help reps get the highest returns on investment (ROI) on their current outbound efforts. 
  • Customer support. Embedded charts can be used within ticket management platforms to track historical averages on customer support key performance indicators (KPIs). The charts can quickly indicate trends going up or down and show progress toward critical KPI measures for the team and individuals. 
  • Retail sales. With embeddable charts included in mobile apps for checking floor inventory, teams can see historical averages and current sales right on the floor while they’re making decisions about what to order and when. 
  • Finance. Embedded charts in Excel or other tools your team uses to track and manage financial performance help your finance teams see exactly what data will help keep the company growing and where teams progress toward business-critical KPIs. 

These examples show how embedded charts can benefit your teams across job functions, industries, and roles. This moves data analysis into users’ workflow so that they can make better decisions based on the most up-to-date information available to your company. Because the data is right where they need it when making decisions about their role, communicating the information simply and clearly helps employees improve their performance.

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. But what is a chart? Let’s look at some of the basic elements of a chart so you and your team can interpret the information you’re sharing accurately.

Components of an embedded chart

Most charts share a few core elements to provide meaning and insight into the data. These are:

  • Title: The title of the chart helps provide context for the data, helping viewers understand why the data matters. 
  • Axes: The x-axis (horizontal) and y-axis (vertical) display the variables being measured. For example, the x-axis might show time periods, while the y-axis represents numerical values such as sales or quantities.
  • Legends: The legend identifies what different colors, shapes, lines, or line styles represent in the chart, such as categories, series, or data groups.
  • Labels: Labels provide context by describing what the axes, data points, or sections of the chart represent. This way, the viewer knows how to interpret the data.

Customizing and formatting your chart

Because understanding the data is the most important function of an embedded chart, you need to make it easier to read. Use custom elements to make the data easier to interpret. Here are some ways you can do that:

  • You can draw attention to the most important information with colors, bold text, or other formatting options.
  • Don’t include unnecessary elements like extra gridlines or labels that don’t add value. This will make the chart easier to read.
  • Use a chart format that best matches the data you’re presenting. We’ll explore chart types below, but use bar charts for comparisons or line charts for trends over time.

What are the types of embedded charts?

Embedded charts come in various forms, each tailored to specific data and analysis needs. These charts make it easier for users to interpret information directly within the tools they use daily. Here are some common types and their applications:

Bar charts

Bar charts are used to compare values across categories. Each bar represents a data point, making differences easy to spot. For instance, a bar chart in a sales application might display revenue by product or region.

Line charts

Line charts are effective for showing trends over time. By connecting data points with lines, these charts make it simple to track progress, such as monthly website traffic or sales growth.

Gauges

Gauge charts are great for monitoring progress toward a goal, such as sales targets or project milestones. These charts use a dial or indicator to show performance levels, offering a quick snapshot of how close you are to reaching your objective.

Gantt charts

Gantt charts visually map out tasks along a timeline and are often used for project management. Embedded Gantt charts help users monitor task progress, start and end dates, and milestones without leaving their workflow tools.

Pie charts

Pie charts illustrate proportions within a whole. Each slice represents a percentage, making it useful for showing distributions like budget allocation or market share.

Maps 

Maps are ideal for visualizing geographic data. An embedded map might display sales performance by state, delivery times across a region, or the density of customer locations. This type of chart helps users make location-based decisions quickly.

Up or down arrows

Arrows provide a simple yet effective way to track changes in data. Embedded up or down arrows are often used to indicate inventory levels, comparing current stock to previous periods or thresholds. For example, an upward arrow might signify an increase in inventory, while a downward arrow indicates depletion.

Scatter plots

Scatter plots highlight relationships between two variables, making them useful for identifying trends, clusters, or outliers. They are commonly used in analytics dashboards for more detailed insights.

Heatmaps

Heatmaps use color intensity to show data variations. They are effective for identifying high-activity areas, such as user clicks on a webpage or performance levels across departments.

How to choose the right chart type

When you’re choosing to embed a chart in a user’s workflow, you could technically use any of the charts described above. But when you’re choosing the right chart type, it’s important to think about context.

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, especially embeddable charts through Domo Everywhere. 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 and Domo Everywhere 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 Everywhere and how it can help you create embedded charts that will drive your business forward.

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