aka Segment: One Analytics API to rule them All
Behind every successful online store is a great marketing strategy and in order to keep track of whether you’re meeting your marketing goals or not, it’s always good to invest in various tools that help you do just that. Some of the popular ones are known as Adwords, Facebook Ads and Adroll while Web Analytics Service let you measure campaign results, conversions and website performance when used with the said tools. However, setting up any of these can be time-consuming and costly because the marketing and analytics tools have to be configured individually.
This is where Segment comes in.
Introducing ‘Segment’
Segment is a customer data hub. Its API allows you to send data to and from any platform or device, after which it translates the data into the required format for the integrations and warehouses that you have added in your Segment. When you implement Segment, your code becomes much more cleaner and understandable, compared to what it is when you use manual integration for each tool.
tracking code segment.io
Segment vs Individual Code Snippet
With segment, you only need one code on the page and send event to segment which then send data to all your integrations
Without segment, you would have to maintain code for each service you are using and send event one at a time
The Many Features of ‘Segment’
Segment has a lot to offer, but a tool is only as good as how it is used. In order to unlock Segment’s full potential and use it to your advantage, you must first spend time knowing the many features that it comes with. Integrations
Segment has tons of Integrations that you can use. Here is a list of all the integrations that are currently available: https://segment.com/integrations. Moreover, your options are not limited to the predefined integrations but you can also submit your tools and become a partner. Read all about it here: https://segment.com/partners.
https://segment.com/docs/integrations/
Warehouses
Warehouses is an interesting trojan horse by Segment. It allows you to load web, mobile and server user data into your database of choice so you can get to insights faster. It does this by offering three key features: I- Advanced Analytics – This lets you dive deeper into your data using SQL to query raw data.
Ii- Cross-product Analysis – This lets you combine all your data into a single place.
Iii- Hundreds of integrations – This allows you to send data to multiple integrations with a single code implementation.
Want to get to know Warehouses a little better? Click here: https://segment.com/blog/introducing-segment-warehouses-redshift-postgres/
What does it cost?
Segment has pricing plans for customers to choose from: Developer (Free), Team (Pay as you go) and Business (Annual Contract). All of these plans allow varying limits of Monthly Tracked Users or MTUs. MTUs are the sum of logged in plus anonymous users that access your product in a given month. You can think of it as the number of unique visitors to your site. A user can make 10 visits but under this system they’ll only be counted as 1 MTU.
The Developer (Free) plan features:
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Unlimited integrations.
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It is only limited to 1 source.
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It is only limited to 1 Warehouse with one sync per day.
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It has only 1 seat available.
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It is limited to 1000 MTUs per month.
The Team (Pay as you go) plan features:
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Unlimited integrations.
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Creation of unlimited sources.
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It is only limited to 1 Warehouse with two syncs per day.
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It has only 7 seats available.
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It is limited to 10000 MTUs per month.
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Pricing is $10 per month.
The Business (Annual Contract) plan features:
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Unlimited integrations.
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Unlimited sources can be created.
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Unlimited Warehouses with :
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Custom Sync Schedule
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Filtering
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Automatic Redshift Vacuuming
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Hosted Redshift Instance
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Unlimited Seats with access control
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It has Alert feature: Notifications when a user makes a change to your account or if there is an issue with your setup
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It has data replay feature: Load all of your historical data into new integrations.
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Its price is custom.
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Premium Support is available with:
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Success Manager
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Implementation Engineer
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Service Level Agreement
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Segment – In a Nutshell
Segment is a very powerful tool that not only helps to save engineering costs but also the time it would normally take to setup new tools. It offers the ability to own your data in raw format and gives advice on which services to use. Moreover, it gives you access to over 114 tools with just a click and is also very flexible, allowing it to work across platforms.
Interested but not entirely convinced? Here are a few other links that will help you understand why using Segment is such a good idea:
https://www.quora.com/What-is-Segment-io-all-about
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-advantage-of-using-Segment-over-Google-Tag-Manager
https://segment.com/docs/faqs/getting-started/what-is-segment/
Have thoughts to share on Segment or other marketing tools? Let us know what they are below.
