It’s a rule of thumb in the technology world that the more accessible a product is, the more widely it will be adopted. As a result, analytics vendors constantly working to make it easier for customers to extract insight from their data. Google led the charge last week by releasing a new machine learning feature for Google Analytics that can automatically highlight important metrics.

If, for instance, a retailer’s ecommerce site experiences an influx of new visitors during a holiday, then the service will now summarize how much traffic it received along with the average purchase size. The information is displayed on neat score cards that are only available in the Google Analytics mobile apps for now, but will presumably make their way to the web version too eventually. The search giant says that the functionality can save users hours of manual data-crunching every week.

Salesforce.com Inc. promises to provide a similar productivity boost with the two extensions that it added to its Wave Analytics service last Thursday, which aim to give users a better understanding of their customers. The first targets workers who use the company’s Marketing Cloud while the other caters to financial professionals. Like Google’s new machine learning feature, the apps make it possible to quickly identity user engagement trends and other important data point that may be of interest to decision-makers.

Salesforce.com shares its focus on helping users make better use of their data with Box Inc., which last week acquired a startup called Wagon Analytics Inc. to bolster its efforts. The outfit has created a dashboarding application that enables workers to quickly visualize and share business information with colleagues. The Wagon team will use the lessons that it learned while building the software to help Box develop new analytics capabilities.

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