API Business Analytics

Business analytics is the practice of using data and statistical analysis to help businesses make better decisions. This can involve analyzing data to identify trends, patterns, and relationships and using that information to help businesses make better decisions about their operations, marketing, and strategy.

The value of Business Analytics is clear. Data-driven decisions can help businesses measure their performance, understand their customers, and, most importantly, drive growth. With an increasing number of businesses relying on APIs as their de facto digital supply chain, there is even more data out there for enterprises to measure and analyze. Yet many are missing out by not making the most of their API business analytics or even using them at all.

Partly, this is due to the speed at which the API market is evolving. Some companies are still catching up with how to productize and monetize their APIs, let alone how to glean insights from them. Those at the forefront of the market, however, are not only monetizing their APIs but also increasingly using API business analytics tools to support further understanding and drive additional growth.

It’s important to distinguish between API business analytics and business analytics APIs:

What Are API Business Analytics?

API Business Analytics refers to data on your APIs that deliver business insights about your revenue, adoption, customer success, and other fundamental business metrics. By understanding this data, you can gain insights into the health of your business courtesy of your APIs. You can also identify trends in the data that can lead to proactive action and predict ways in which you can drive increased engagement with your API products.

What Are Business Analytics APIs?

Business Analytic APIs allow you to directly pull out business information about your product using an API call. These APIs cover a wide range of functionality, from real-time data visualization and predictive modeling to metric reporting. Examples of Business Analytic API products include Google’s Analytics API, Salesforce’s Analytics API, and Sendgrid’s API. Sengrid’s Business Analytics API allows you to retrieve relevant information about your email campaigns, such as how many emails have been opened or clicked, which could then help improve customer onboarding.

Why Are API Business Analytics Important?

API business analytics are important for a range of reasons. They can support businesses to:

• Track their growth
• Enrich user profiles with customer data to better understand who is using their APIs
• Identify trends and anomalies that can proactively flag problems
• Spot areas for improvement that will increase customer engagement and drive revenue growth

Important API Business Analytics Metrics

Looking at an API business analytics example can be helpful. API analytics include both application engineering-focused metrics like requests per minute and average latency and product-focused metrics like engagement, retention, and onboarding speed. API business analytics focus more on metrics related to revenue, adoption, and customer success — trends that provide insights into core business performance. It’s the difference between looking at your top 10 customers by API usage versus your top 10 customers by revenue.

This is where an API analytics platform becomes crucial. As an API analytics and monitoring provider, it can deliver API business analytics that drive product-led growth, innovation, and API monetization. It traces every request (including request and response payloads) and supports queries by any parameter, examining everything from engineering metrics to API usage, growth, retention, and consumption.

It was Sir Francis Bacon who first coined the phrase “knowledge itself is power” back in 1597. He was spot on. Businesses with this level of insight into their API data and their business health have huge opportunities to scale and grow strategically.

API Business Analytics Providers

We’ve looked at what API-first analytics tools can provide in terms of API business analytics, but there are other tools and providers out there that focus on business intelligence as well. They mostly fall into the camp of Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools and are offered by the following:

DataDog

DataDog’s metrics are modeled around servers and services, targeting the needs of DevOps and site reliability teams. Those groups are concerned about the health of infrastructure and tech operations. Making sure that infrastructure is up and running efficiently is of utmost importance, and Datadog is one of the most popular infrastructure and application monitoring tools on the market.

New Relic APM

Another traditional APM tool is New Relic, which focuses more on monitoring the health of websites and infrastructure. This includes infrastructure metrics like memory usage and requests per minute, along with application-level health, such as Apdex scores and latency. Similar to Datadog, New Relic’s metrics are modeled around servers and services, so you know how your infrastructure is doing.

Kibana

Kibana is one of the de facto open-source log visualization tools out there for engineers. It’s part of the official ELK stack (Elasticsearch Logstash Kibana), making it quick to set up. Whilst it’s well suited for high-cardinality log data analysis, it’s quite limited in the types of visualizations supported. Kibana’s primary use case is to provide log search and light analysis on raw event data rather than offering a true API monitoring tool. For debugging use cases, this may be sufficient, but popular business metrics like funnels and retention analysis cannot be performed by Kibana.