Tealium Customer Data Hub vs. Twilio Segment vs. Webtrends Analytics

Well suited: Any company that has a variety of data interspersed across multiple systems and is trying to get a more unified understanding of their customer profile—that enriched customer view of having all these disparate data sources and wanting to bring them together in a relatively seamless manner, and then having that more nuanced understanding of the entirety of the customer and being able to action off of it. Which again, I feel like is a core marketing use case.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Scenarios 1. If you want to use web server log files as input to your web analytics, then Webtrends will provides a good product, with great ease of implementation. Don't even think about being cheap on hardware, and make sure Webtrends runs on real servers, not in a VM environment. 2. If you want to use Data Tagging, similar to Google Analytics or Site Catalyst, Webtrends has a powerful product, just be prepared to pay. 3. If you are new to Web Analytics, but it is the strategic direction, start with Webtrends on Premises. Questions to Ask 1. What are you trying to accomplish? 2. Can you place a dollar value on the benefit that you expect/need from Webtrends? 3.Can you live with Webtrends running SaaS?

• Activation in real time - it's really good and you can literally see the information being activated in all other technologies that my clients use, like TikTok, Facebook, Google, et cetera. At the time that a client arrives on your website, you have instant data to enrich the profiles and activate on this channel. So this is really good and it's something that Tealium give us the control in order to do that.
• The other thing is that you have the power to choose what data you want to collect and what data you do not want to collect. Tealium is particularly very good on doing that.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Control privacy, data sharing and competitive industrial knowledge using Webtrends on premises
• Great control over custom reports, custom dimensions and metrics
• Flexible tool which allows multiple methods of data capture. To my knowledge it was the first tool with a Tag Builder / Tag Management function built in via a supporting website.

• Audiences—don't they technically exist in Tealium? They are just streamed—no count, no backfill, etc.
• Working backward to identify issues involves lots of clicking in the UI, going from audience to audience attribute, badge to event attribute, and so on.
• You have to wait for a Real-Time event to see the payload. There is no sample or other option.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• The big downside, the elephant in the room, is that it does not (as of right now) have on-demand segmenting, drilldowns, etc. You have to think of what you want in advance and create those reports then analyze some data. This is huge. You can, of course, re-analyze old data after creating new reports but you still have to wait. (This deficiency may become obsolete with the release of Webtrends Explore later this month (May 2014).)
• It has fewer mature integrations with other products and databases than competitors do, although I'm told it works with SharePoint better than anything else does.
• Its attribution modeling capability is behind Google Analytics'. In my humble opinion, this could be changed quickly if Webtrends would make some tweaks to its standard visitor history files (i.e. preserve the order in which past visits were sourced beyond the single most recent one, rather than storing all those past sources as a randomized list).
• It doesn't incorporate statistical tests, confidence intervals, or statistical associations. However, this same criticism can be applied to its competitors (other than A/B Testing products). It's a tabulation program, as they all are. In this respect, web analytics tools as a group are relatively primitive. Sorry to bring this up as a criticism of Webtrends but it's my pet peeve about the whole industry and I just have to say it. (p.s. take advantage of the heavy-duty Webtrends Scheduled Export functionality to get really granular data that you can feed to a stats program to get significances.)
• Although the documentation, help screens, phone support and the knowledge base have improved tremendously in recent years, there is still a pretty steep learning curve because it is different from the tools that entry-level users may have already been exposed to. This can be a shock and many users are alienated at first because they just don't get some of the fundamentals at first. I'd like to see much better help screens that are thoroughly interlinked with the KB and documentation. Having superb online support would make a world of difference with the adoption of this basically powerful tool.

I already know that my company has no plans to discontinue use of Tealium. We are heavily reliant on it due to a huge number of product teams and developers we would have to work with to place tags across many pages. Tealium is already there on the pages, and our application/product teams are familiar with how to integrate it. It is just the simplest way to ensure that new data requirements are implemented in a timely manner.

Incentivized

I would be willing to try Webtrends again AFTER some research from other users. I would need to see that users mention better and faster customer support on questions and issues that arise while using the software. The software is capable of vast and incredible things, but if it isnt properly set up and supported during use, it is just a big hassel and waste of everyones time and money.

Once you understand how it works and how to implement things, it is a dream and very user friendly. There is the initial learning curve but there are oceans of helpers available to you to help you bridge that initial gap and get going. Take the time to learn it up front and you will never have any problems. And support is great and available to answer questions

Incentivized

If I could give it a 0, I would. Not having an intuitive user interface made it impossible to convince non-analytic business users to use the tool on their own. Even as a seasoned analyst, frequent calls were needed to get what should be simple tasks done. Account managers don't understand the tool either, and have to refer you to technical support

It's been flawless as far as I am concerned.

Incentivized

It is much better than average. Down time usually occurs because of a need to refresh the server on our end.

Sometimes publishing can take longer than expected

Incentivized

The v9 admin interface and v10 reporting interface work as well as expected, but have a tendency to be pokey, especially for bulky reports and whenever you're connected to wifi. I much prefer using the REST API for all reporting for this reason, which simply dumps out the data and doesn't bother with the user interface.

The support team often is so quick to respond and so helpful when it comes to working with the needs of my clients and being able to resolve potential shortcomings or technical issues or surrounding the tool. There have been times more recently that I’ve gotten more generic service rather than the tailored experience that I have come to expect.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I once went on to Twitter to ask for help from my network of analytics people, and Webtrends themselves responded. They have been an excellent partner in making sure that their product is being used to the best of it's ability and I greatly appreciate that. Both Omniture and Google Analytics, do not have that level of support over social media

The in-person training was comprehensive enough to get you started, but I strongly recommend having a more experienced person when beginning with the tool.

Did what we needed to onboard us onto the platform

Incentivized

Webtrends provides several free webinars over the course of the year, many of which I would expect to pay for. The people providing the webinars seem to have a good feel for real-world application of the product.

Implementation had some bumps in the road and it was new for all of us, but for the most part, it was easier than many other implementations we've done with other technologies.

Incentivized

Careful planning and patience. Use a non-public test site to fine tune tags and reporting. Despite best laid plans, there will be surprises when you collect the data, run the analysis and begin generating reports using the tool. Perform a tag audit to ensure tags fire as desired.

Tealium Customer Data Hub can do it all in one. Whereas, I think by using multiple Tealium Customer Data Hubs, we can utilize what each tool is really good at. In an ideal world, we'd like to use Tealium Customer Data Hub for everything, but one thing that we struggle with is Audience Segmentation, and we are looking for a one touch solution, without a lot of the work since the data is already there.

Incentivized

We chose Twilio Segment for the good API integration and node resources, I would use Ontraport again, particularly if I didn't have the requirements for API and development/platform integration. Certainly the set up and management is easy and seamless with both the API and the user interface to use depending on circumstances and requirements.

Incentivized

Webtrends has its work cut out for itself considering you have the behemoth Google Analytics and Google Analytics Premium having a strong offering and brand recognition for the price of free. After reviewing the paid service I'd suggest you start off with GA as a cheaper alternative that is just as robust, if not much more flexible in regards to the reporting and goal tracking needs for our company.

Incentivized

Like anything it could be cheaper but we still feel we get value from it.

Incentivized

Never had an issue, scales as we use it.

Incentivized

Very easy to work with and relatively cost effective

Incentivized

• There has been a near immeasurable return on customer data and improvement of our quality for our physical products due to be in tune with the customer. This has changed our way of doing things for the better to gain a better flow and overall workplace experience.
• A negative is that Tealium AudienceStream becomes harder to manuever and use data analytics for when a database has been existing for a fairly large amount of time. It goes from an agile ship to a huge vessel that takes many components to be able to move.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Webtrends has had a positive impact on site visitation because it allowed us to understand the sources by domain for site traffic and find out ways to increase visits from those domains.
• Webtrends has also allowed us to understand areas of optimization on the site, which has had a positive impact on the overall user journey on the site, likely leading to longer site duration and engagement.