📊Getting Started : Embedded Analytics
Last updated
Last updated
Welcome! If you are here, it means you are ready to dive into the world of embedded analytics with Toucan. You want to integrate white-labeled analytics into your product to enrich your offering, impress your clients, and accelerate your roadmap. You are in the right place! 🙌
Whether you are a new client ❤️ ready to get started or a prospect ✨ testing the Free Trial, we will explore together how to navigate effectively to achieve your goals.
Audience
This guide is for product managers, data analysts, and developers integrating embedded analytics into their software with Toucan. It is for those who want to integrate white-labeled analytics efficiently.
This guide does not fully cover authentication management and embedding charts into your code, which are explained in the linked documentation. These aspects are crucial, but this guide focuses on the key steps to get started with embedded analytics. For more details, refer to the associated documentation.
The goal of this guide is simple: to support you step by step in getting started with embedded analytics.
Before you begin, it is essential to understand the major steps. This guide will present these key steps so that you can ultimately integrate personalized charts directly into your product or web portal. 📺
This is not a click-by-click tutorial but rather a general guide to help you get oriented, giving you the necessary foundations to explore. You will find the associated documentation throughout and at the end of this guide.
You will be guided to see how to:
Connect to data
Create variables (to personalize the experience)
Create customized datasets
Create contextualized charts
Embed these charts into your interface while managing secure authentication
Toucan can integrate analytics into your product at different levels of granularity, from simple and tailored widgets to full dashboards, while displaying the right data to the right person.
You can find documentation about our embedded layouts
You just need to iterate gradually to add more analytics after that.
To start, create a Toucan App, then go to the DataHub to create a connection to a data source, such as PostgreSQL. This step allows you to establish a solid foundation on which you can build your visualizations.
If you prefer, it is also possible to upload a flat file. This first step is crucial as it provides the necessary data for the following steps.
To provide a personalized experience, it is important to create variables that will help to adapt the content for each user.
First, go to the administration interface via the App Store to create the user attributes that will be used to personalize the experience (you need Admin rights for this). These attributes can be of different types and named as you wish, for example:
Client: To identify data specific to each client.
Region: To adapt the content based on location.
First Name: To personalize the storytelling with the user's first name.
These variables should, of course, align with your Data Model and will likely correspond to columns.
Next, return to your Toucan App and go to the Variable Management menu (at the top right) of the application itself. Finally, assign default values to these variables to simulate the user experience.
For example:
Client: Apple
Region: California
First Name: Chris
These values will allow you to view the data as if you were a real user carrying these user attribute values, thereby validating the personalization of visualizations in an app-building environment (Toucan studio).
In Toucan, datasets can be saved as Stored (stored in Toucan - see limitations in the documentation) or Live (leveraging the underlying data source).
In embedded analytics, data is often processed in real time, and data is segregated by a “Client Identifier” (or "Product Identifier"), which would be a column in a “One Big Table” data model. If the architectural model is different, we can work with you to find the appropriate solution. We will assume this scenario for this getting started.
Data is the foundation of your project. With YouPrep, Toucan's data transformation tool, you can adjust data to meet your business needs: grouping data, creating conditional rules, performing joins, etc.
Did you know? 👀 YouPrep can even write the SQL language for you for certain compatible connectors.
For example, you can apply a Filter Rows step on the column that helps identify a client A or client B (e.g., "Client"). This filter ensures that only relevant data for each user is retained. Once the dataset is transformed and saved, it can be reused in your application, providing a personalized foundation for visualizations.
By default, Toucan will use the value defined in the Variable Management menu.
In production, however, Toucan will use the user attribute value carried by the Json Web Token (see step 5).
Now that your data is prepared, it is time to create contextualized charts. Create a story in a Toucan chapter, consisting of one or two charts, with contextualization (narrative, tips, glossary), accompanied by KPIs and filters.
To create these elements, you can follow the various documentation pages to enrich your Data Story! If you want to move quickly, simply create a chart like a bar chart, leaderboard, or line chart. 😊
Toucan can apply filters to charts via the filter bar at the top, relying on a column from your dataset or another dataset with a column of the same name.
This allows your end users to filter and explore their data!
Finally, do not hesitate to complete the Narrative above the chart to give it meaning and make its definition self-explanatory. Variables tied to user attributes can even be directly integrated into the narrative to make the experience more engaging, such as including the user's first name in the text.
We call ‘templating’ syntaxes including variables to make you text (or data) dynamic depending on the context of use. You can refer to the Templating documentation for this or the reference to variables.
Don't forget to change your colors and logos in the White Label and Customization Menu.
You will probably need a developer to finalize this step if you are a customer. (cf doc)
To finalize, it is time to integrate your work directly into your software. Use a Json Web Token (JWT)-based authentication system to dynamically pass user attributes to Toucan. It is like the JWT is an ID card, and the user attributes are the characteristics of a person on the ID card: a number, height, eye color, etc.
Be sure to create user tokens that carry user attributes with the same syntax as defined in the Variable Management section. For instance, if you have a "country" column to filter, it will be easier if your Variable is called "country".
Once the authentication system is in place (see the associated documentation), don't forget to publish your work in production (Publish Button), then generate an embed by clicking on the "..." in the interface.
Copy the web component into your frontend, place the token, and everything is ready! Each user will thus experience a personalized experience based on their data. Here the token was prepared for this demo.
Of course you can dig in the Integration Documentation to deep dive in what we can customize.
We have explored together the steps to get started with embedded analytics using Toucan: connecting to data, creating variables and customized datasets, creating contextualized charts, and finally embedding them in your interface while managing secure authentication.
Once these skills are mastered, the Toucan solution will allow you to add analytics to your product, without any code, in just a few minutes, providing a personalized and engaging experience.
There is much more to discover such as the use of our SDK (lien) to deeply integrate Toucan with your product or whitelabeling to blend Toucan viz within your design.
The world of analytics is limitless: your clients probably expect standard indicators shared across your product! 👥 You could even address specific personas or offer a paid analytics module as part of your service offering. 💰 Your website could even feature public analytics or a barometer to raise awareness among your audience about certain metrics! 🌎 In short, data is just waiting for you to bring it to life.😊
This Webinar Replay could help to understand the same Embedded Analytics path also 🎁 It's free!
If you have any doubts or questions after reading this Getting Started guide, feel free to reach out to us! 💌
