Segment

"All the info you need. In a snap!"

Avantages: It is incredibly easy to install with modules for any kind of source (app, server, API, jacasript).
It sends coherent and consistent data to hundreds of destinations (I think there are ~200 and counting, but new ones can be added with very little coding), and new destinations can be added with no intervention by an engineer.
Among the destinations, there's also relational Databases: you can really track ALL actions of any single user of your system and having access to historical data with a click. This is amazing!
It offers an easy and intuitive privacy mechanism that lets you deleta data of a single users from multiple systems with a single click.
It offers common, consistent data to all different areas of a company: marketing, product development, finance, ... (and you can chose what different offices can see).

Inconvénients: It is pricy: the cost is based on the average number of single users tracked per month and it's not cheap at all. So better to understand exactly how it can help you grow your business (and how you can fully exploit it) before you decide to adopt it.

"This CDP is great if you have a plug & play website, more tricky if you have a custom built website."

Commentaires: The customer service team, while fast and responsive, was not particularly knowledgeable about how to get around these issues we were having with visual tagger, and thus we had to work with a consultant that had the know-how of how to fully integrate Segment with our website through GTM. However, now that we have gotten our custom Segment setup up and running, it is very powerful and we're able to communicate our website event and tracking data with a multitude of analytics and other marketing tools. So overall, it has been a challenging experience, but once you get it working, it is worth the extra effort.

Avantages: Segment was easy to setup and integrate with our website, using the Javascript code they provided. Also the Segment interface is well designed and easy to navigate. The settings for your Destinations are all clear and laid out, so you can make changes effortlessly. The neatest feature is the visual tagger, which allows you to create and track triggers/events on your website without having to code anything at all. It's great if you want to track very basic behaviors like button clicks or form submissions.

Inconvénients: The most difficult part of Segment was when we wanted to track more granular data, such as user identities/emails. I believe if you have a typical website, built off of WordPress, or Shopify, you might not have these issues. But if you have a custom built website like ours, you will need some technical know-how in order to capture the finer data. For example, visual tagger did not work for us when we tried to use the identify call analytics.js, because our website stored user ID info on our data layer, not the presentation layer, which is only what Visual tagger can see. In order to access fields in your data layer, you'll need to use something like Google Tag Manager (GTM) to trigger and fire those events in Segment (shout out to McGaw.io for helping us with this!). So, if you have a more complex website, triggering certain events or getting fine granular data in Segment is not intuitive.

"Data loss and bad customer support"

Commentaires: 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.

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

Inconvénients: Unreliable.
Bad customer support.

"Addresses a major use case | requires a data architect to own the implementation and instrumentation"

Avantages: The ability to easily connect disparate sources of customer data. The ease of adding sources and destinations with or without native integration with Segment. The ability to insert third-party snippets on our site through Segment. The pricing structure of charging by usage rather than by seat, making it easy to increase adoption across the org.

Inconvénients: Still requires technical support to map out the integrations and instrument the right tracking events in your app or on your website. Not all connections are intuitive and the UI makes it hard to find payload information and logs. I recommend pairing a business owner with a technical owner at the outset of implementation.

"Segment does all the heavy lifting so you don't have to"

Avantages: A centralised place to standardise all of your data through ETL, analytics as well as computed traits that create consistency of information across operational saas systems. Segment's investment in protocols roadmap provides the tools required to address the automatic monitoring of data.

Inconvénients: There aren't many things that come to mind.