data.ai (formerly App Annie) is a mobile data and analytics platform designed to help customers create winning mobile experiences and achieve excellence. Founded in 2010, the company launched their mobile market data solution and in 2019 acquired Libring, an advertising monetization and spend offering, to expand their capabilities and comprise a complete mobile performance platform. The vendor boasts more than 1,100 enterprise clients and 1 million registered users across all geographies and…
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Twilio Segment
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Segment is a customer data platform that helps engineering teams at companies like Tradesy, TIME, Inc., Gap, Lending Tree, PayPal, and Fender, etc., achieve time and cost savings on their data infrastructure, which was acquired by Twilio November 2020. The vendor says they also enable Product, BI, and Marketing teams to access 200+ tools (Mixpanel, Salesforce, Marketo, Redshift, etc.) to better understand and optimize customer preferences for growth— all integrations are pre-built and…
I think that App Annie will be handy for the companies that provide service in multiple countries - so they have to deal with local competitors research and track the performance of the app (by the position and by the reviews) in different stores. I think that for a one-country app, many of the features will be less relevant. At the same time, App Annie offers custom plans, so I see how the user experience can be different.
Best suited: - Merging emails coming from: Facebook leads forms, Unbounce or landing pages forms, Google forms, any other kind of lead generation tool and bundling all that information together for a single user "profile". - Passing events generated in multiple applications by the same user (product selected in web, product discarded in cart, etc) and delivering those events into other applications (like a CRM) Less appropriate: - Reading/updating data directly from segment from a frontend application
Multi-platform. Segment has easy integrations in many different web, backend, and app platforms/frameworks. We use the Segment SDK in Android and iOS as well as our node.js backend.
Segment is fairly affordable for early-stage companies that are trying out different analytics software. The "developer" plan is free and is suitable for most companies with products that have a small user base.
The UI is great! It is extremely intuitive and easy-to-learn, and this made it take very little time to integrate this software into our analytics and marketing workflows.
App Annie is extremely limited if you are on the free plan. While you can garner some golden nuggets from the free plan, it's extremely difficult to make needle moving decisions based on the free data. It would be great if App Annie would disclose pricing on their website, plus have a non-free/enterprise plan were you could pick and choose features they offer.
After nearly considering a paid plan with App Annie, I decided not to purchase because of the broken trust that stemmed from their sales team. I often got cold-calls from their reps - even when I never contacted them for a sales member to call me. I was bombarded for about 2 weeks straight with phone calls and hard-core sales emails with just asking to talk, no questions or personalization. This cold, unwanted and unwelcome outreach solidified my decision not to purchase.
More and richer sources. For example, MailChimp is a source but the data you get from MailChimp is quite limited. I ended up writing my own scripts to take better advantage of MailChimp's API because Segment's integration was lacking.
Better examples on how to set up event tracking. Pageview tracking is easy enough, but it would be nice if they had a sample app and corresponding code for it and showed you, via Git commits, how to add various kinds of events.
Well the fact that the freemium features are all that I need right now, I will most definitely continue to use it on a daily basis. I might upgrade to the pro version in the future if I need more data than what I am getting now. But for now it works great for what I need.
I have not had to contact support a lot of times. The few times I did, I got correct and lengthy responses, but they took some time to answer. Their product is very complete, so unless you have a specific question, you will probably not need to contact support at any time.
Over the period it took us to set up, we kept going back to their enablement team to help us with the setup, and they were always ready and were very helpful in the entire process. Even with their documentation, they took the time out to help us work through the process. We've never had a message/email unanswered for more than an hour on working days.
We use Google 360 and are able to do a much deeper dive into the activity we see on our apps. I think App Annie is a great starting point product, but for more in depth analytics, something like a Google 360 or Adobe might be better.
I'm not sure these are "official competitors" (or alternatives) to Segment, but we use them in parallel for different goals. We use Datadog for logging and monitoring and we use Mixpanel to perform data analysis based on the data we gather using Segment (and other sources). I don't think we ever evaluated any other service vs. Segment. I think we got a recommendation on Segment, liked it and decided to use it (and we're happy with it since).
App Annie has had neither a positive nor negative impact on our ROI or business objectives. Our team currently uses their free, very limited plan for data discrepancy with our main ASO tool. Otherwise, we have connected our apps and let the data flow in. We go in the account about once every 2-3 months.
With App Annie's data we have solidified that our other paid ASO tool we use has accurate data and that we will continue to pay for that tool. So in that regards, App Annie's provided us with a confirmation in our competitor ASO tool purchase decision.
Segment has enabled us to get a full view of our front end activity, join it to our back-end activity, and get full visibility into our funnels and user activity.
Segment lets us send events to ad tools with a full audit trail so all the numbers line up.
Segment also brings data from other sources into our data warehouse, saving our data engineering time from building commodity connectors.
