Easy to set-up both for server-side event tracking, and client-side. Connects in seconds to various 3rd party tools for analytics, marketing, tracking, support, and more. It's made it super easy for us to test new services by turning integrations on and off without any additional needed development.
When they changed their pricing to MTUs, it made it extremely pricey for websites and apps with anonymous users. It'd be way better if pricing was based on the number of events, and not tracked users. If your website sees a ton of anonymous users, be ready for a high cost. We do occasionally go back and forth trying to decide if Segment is worth the cost, or if developing an internal service that sends data to any new services would be a better use of time and costs.
We use Segment to track users and send data to various analytics tools, like Amplitude, KeenIO, and a few others. We've removed tracking of anonymous users, and only load up Segment for a specific type of logged in user in order to reduce costs.
I started using segment in 2013 when it was called segment.io and was just a better replacement for dozens of js snippets I wanted to add to my web apps. In the course of years, I found it can offer much more including: - Zero hassle integration especially for eCommerce, multi-touchpoint (say website + app) services - A true productivity booster especially for developers for debugging what is wrong with a specific integration (say Google Analytics) - Organizer of tracking plan, adding uniformity and consistency to all events you track - Simply becoming the core of all analytics data flows you need
Their price is not cheap. However, if you take into account the intangible future costs like developer costs to enable/disable an integration or debug an existing integration then it might be justifiable.
Centralizing all analytics integration in a simple, manageable platform. And with new Segment Personas, it helps a lot by creating much better audiences and feeding those to marketing automation tools.
The onboarding process - Segment has clearly spent a lot of time perfecting the process of getting up and running with multi-platform analytics & data warehousing. In a matter of a day I had integrated analytics into an application, shared that with multiple services, and routed it to our data warehouse.
The Team plan is fairly priced for what you get, but it's a big jump up for the (our) simple initial use case of setting up multiple environments for a single application, or sending analytics data from multiple related platforms.
For a startup, Segment allows developers to focus on building the application without costly distractions. Segment's data warehousing has saved us a ton of what would have been costly data systems architecture time. The flexibility to leverage any existing analytics platform as our needs evolve is an excellent value. The analytics.js API is very well designed and has been painless to incorporate into our React / Redux app (thanks to the redux-segment library).
The tracking script is excellent and a massive improvement on trying to use google analytics. It doesn't have a big impact on load speed either, which is useful. You can send data to multiple destinations, which is nice. The audience remarketing lists can be useful, although I have found better ways of integrating existing audiences with google advertising. The javascript tag is really good.
You have to pay through the roof to see the value of the software I almost prefer just using google tag manage.r The cost for monthly user pricing is insane. All of their 'AI' stuff is a bit markety to marketers.
Tracking user interactions in the app is probably the best thing you can do with Segment. our app has a lot of in-app purchases, so at every purchase location we can use a descriptive marker to create an event and send it to segment, and then use that data in intercom and other apps for very granular marketing. Our app is written in Vue, so the analytics.js javascript library and the simple analytics.track work very well to create descriptive events.
The combination of a great way to gather data on users and their actions, with the massive list of other tools it integrates with. It allows us to simply and quickly try out different tools, as the time to set them up is so low, as they can get all the data from Segment. This also allows us to be more flexible in changing the set of tools we use.
Like many SaaS tools, the pricing goes up real fast for all features, even for a small startup, and so we have had to rely on other tools for things that we could have used Segment for had the price for the full functionality been more reasonable.
1) Allowed us to develop a consistent method to get data on users from their first web site visit to deeper interaction in our app. 2) Enabled us to reuse this method across many different tools, and thus reduced the switching cost between such tools.
Only have to code once and then you can toggle on/off integrations. It's awesome! Nearly ever major product is incorporated into it so it very helpful. They also have some really great debugging tools for figuring out what events are firing and what aren't.
It's can be pricey for B2C sites or high traffic sites since they look at visitors. A high number of unidentified visitors can add up in terms of price. Also, New features always seam to be costly add-ons instead of included in core product.
It is very useful if you are using multiple services and don't want to constantly update site code. From a developer perspective and data consistency perspective, it's an amazing tool!
In addition to integrating with nearly every third-party tool imaginable, the actual API itself reflects best practices in tracking. The presence of both server and client side tracking tools ensures that data is always collected as close to the source as possible. Reliability has been near perfect so far. Support is top notch and bugs are few and far between. Price is generally fair, given the amount of value they provide.
It would be nice if there was a built-in mechanism to provide client-side only integrations (such as Facebook ads) data from the server-side. Something analogous to Google Tag Manager's "dataLayer". Pricing for Warehouses offering is less reasonable. Would be nice if there was a more graceful tool-by-tool off of Segment (as adoption of certain tools become mature and more advanced functionality is necessary, it becomes less appropriate to multiplex them through Segment - but you don't really want to turn the integration off entirely while making that transition).
Use to hook up all marketing and engagement tools to real-time activities from our production systems. Powers our email system through Customer.io, our analytics through Google Analytics and Mixpanel, our A/B testing through Optimizely - the list goes on. Allows us to try new tools in no time at all, with next to no developer involvement. Eliminates the need for in-house devs to spend a lot of time ramping up on each tool's API, only to discover that the tool was not a good fit for the company.
I really the technology segment has. Everything works really well, and has many tools for troubleshooting which are missing in this domain.
The pricing. The jump from free to paid is very big, and as a small startup we don't feel comfortable doing it at all.
We wanted to simplify our dev efforts on everything analytics.