Segment

Segment - The Data Layer to Have

Kommentit: Segment solves the problem of add script once. Enable quickly.
Data flows and needs a pipe to steer it in the right direction. Segment makes this easy.
Create a data science team in seconds and connect to a wide and vast number of tools and connections from Adwords to Facebook all the way through to iOS and Android. This covers many bases.

Hyvät puolet:

Segment have built a best in class data layer and data management tool. The tool is easy to set up and creating destinations and understanding sources is simple. Add the code for Web, Mobile or a data warehouse. Then enable product and marketing teams to enable and disable marketing and product tools easily. The new personas feature is also incredibly powerful. Make collecting analytics .track and .page and .identify easy.

Huonot puolet:

Segment does make data easy and because of the quality of the tool it does come at a cost. The benefit is it does scale with you because the price plan works on MTUs. But it really depends on the size of your business. Beware not to over enable and connect too much if you are not using it. This will add un-necessary load which can impact mobile page speed.

We could not have conducted marketing without Segment, and their staff is incredibly helpful

Kommentit: It requires the ability to manage various sources and multiple destinations while maintaining an organized, consistent track plan. A system such as Segment is incredibly valuable for firms with several data sources and destinations that are continually growing.

Hyvät puolet:

Our major objective is to monitor activity on our company's website(s), particularly user activity. Pre-built interfaces with marketing, data, and analytics systems make it easy for marketers to configure connectors without the need for engineering resources for each integration request. Segment has saved us time throughout the years that would have been spent connecting and syncing data amongst many technologies. Segment is a wonderful tool for us due to its intuitive interface, extensive documentation, and ability to debug events.

Huonot puolet:

Some of the destinations and sources held by Segment and its partners can necessitate interaction with support teams (for example, SDKs, missing features, or bugs in functionality).

Key component to populate data between different services

Hyvät puolet:

Ready made integrations with most critical SaaS services makes it easy to share data between systems.

Huonot puolet:

The pricing model is sometimes not the best given how event intense your application is.

Data loss and bad customer support

Kommentit: At first it sounds great, one stop shop for all you analytics needs. What they don't tell you is:
1. Segment API is far less reliable than any of the underlying analytics tools. I've never had any data loss with mixpanel, since I switched to segment I had 3 severe data loss incidents, one was a segment server failure, one was a result of Segment's API and the 3rd is still under investigation.
2. It's literally impossible to get proper support for urgent issues. no matter how much I emphasize the urgency, they'll send 1 reply a day, with the most useless information and ask the same basic questions over and over and over again.

Hyvät puolet:

Reduce the amount of code that handles analytics and tracking No real alternative

Huonot puolet:

Unreliable. Bad customer support.

Very useful to collect data

Hyvät puolet:

We use segment to collect and send data in different destination, it's easy to use and to implements

Huonot puolet:

Options are quite expensive, if you want to add Personna / protocols, the price grows quickly