Marchex is a mobile advertising analytics company that connects online behavior to real-world, offline actions. By linking critical touchpoints in the customer journey, Marchex’s products enable a 360-degree view of marketing effectiveness. Brands and agencies utilize Marchex’s products to transform business performance. Marchex Call Tracking, an analytics platform for click-to-call, measures more than 250 million calls annually for brands and agencies 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…
The Marchex platform is suitable for you to draw conclusions on how to approach your users. It also helps you with conversational improvements and data analysis. I recommend if you already have a large user base who buy your service and are always asking for explanations to hire Marchex for sure
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
Marchex does exactly what you need it to do. It allows businesses to quickly and effectively create online and offline call-tracking numbers to measure marketing performance.
Marchex offers a variety of additional options, features, and capabilities outside of their core business model, which is call tracking. These business offerings appeal to smaller businesses, since they are primarily an enterprise-level call-tracking platform.
Marchex allows you to listen and mark phone calls based on whether or not they lead to a conversion, if you business has the time to manage this process, it is an effective way to determine which source/mediums are providing the highest inside-conversion rate.
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.
Although customer support is only a phone call away, trouble shooting was not their strongest area. There was usually only one person who could help with technical support and getting past the gate keepers to talk to that person was not easy.
Salesmen were difficult to get in touch with. You think it would be easy to negotiate a contract to add more services but this proved to be a difficult task as well.
Online reporting could use improvement. If you wanted to sift through data you had to download a spreadsheet to manipulate the data. Very little beyond simple reporting could be accomplished on their platform.
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.
We renew Marchex each year, we love it! It's a great investment. It's woven into a few of our products that we offer our clients so we wouldn't stop using it any time soon. The clients are big fans of it
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).
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.
