TagCommander, from European company Commanders Act, is a tag management product designed to handle website tags - and also SDKs in a single SDK container - through a management interface without the need for technical expertise.
The company has partnerships with WebTrends, Criteo, and over 200 tag solutions worldwide.
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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…
If you need a single place where you can handle all the third party pixels, this is a well-suited platform. As well as if you want to keep the deployment independent from all other (and more complex) deployments driven by IT. If you need a pixel to be fired not just when the page loads, but based on user actions, you should use the events and that's pretty complex to handle.
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.
Reports. Tag Commander lacks in term of reports of what's happening. There is an additional module called Attribution Management System that gives you a lot of insights, but more basic reports to understand what has been fired will be useful.
Support. Tag Commander support is very low responsive. It took several days to have the first feedback and generally, it takes a lot of emails to get what you need.
Deduplication engine flexibility. The engine is there and it works pretty well, until you have a slightly different need. In that case you need to implement something custom in terms of implementation, reports, etc. A more flexible approach would be useful.
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.
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.
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).
It let us deploy new pixels/fixes to pixels independently from the IT deployment process.
It let us easily turn on/off and sort the pixel execution based on partners' priority, assuring better data tracking for more important partners.
It provides out of the box pixel implementation for tons of partners, but really often we need to rewrite the pixel from scratch as they're not up to date.
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.
