Likelihood to Recommend Ensighten Pulse is particularly well suited to the type of work Ovative/group does in the marketing attribution space, but is also very well suited to drive the data collection efforts for personalization on-site as well. Pulse is also extremely well suited in scenarios where a client may want to track individuals across many domains or touchpoints
Read full review 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
Read full review Pros Pulse is the ultimate tracking tool. Almost anything you want to do with it is enabled and capable. Pricing for Pulse was very aggressive as an early buyer. The support team for Pulse is always very quick to respond and adapt their product roadmap to meet customer feedback. Read full review 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. Read full review Cons Documentation - While Ensighten Pulse itself and the implementation process of the core components are documented rather well, the peripheral implementation steps, i.e. how to use this with a specific marketing platform, are not well documented. That said, the Ensighten support channels have been hugely beneficial in making these steps happen. Read full review 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. Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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).
Read full review Return on Investment We identified over 20M impressions that should have been re-allocated due to frequency caps and have utilized our modeling to push more adaptive frequency caps by marketing message through our ad network. We will pilot a program where we block 'saturated' users and those exhibiting 'bot-like' behavior through our ad networks to further improve our advertising effectiveness. We do have a resource cost in maintaining a separate server and a systems developer to maintain our environment. Where I'd prefer to pay for a full SaaS application and utilize that resource in another area. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots Twilio Segment Screenshots