The best option for event tracking out there
August 14, 2018
The best option for event tracking out there
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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Overall Satisfaction with Segment
I was working as the head of analytics at a startup incubator, so I evaluated many different data and marketing automation tools. After trying most of them, I settled on Segment as the best for a few different reasons. The main reason is the ease in basic event and page tracking. After that, it was all the different sources and integrations.
- Ease of event tracking. Just like Google Analytics, except you can warehouse your own data for a reasonable price. Warehousing your own event data is critical for companies that want to leverage data science at some point in their existence (which should be all companies these days).
- Price. Startups can get by with the free version of Segment for a long time.
- Integrations and sources. Segment makes it easy to warehouse other types of data such as Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, etc. It also allows you to send event data to 3rd party services like Google Analytics.
- 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.
- Event tracking lets you take ownership of your own data, which in part makes it easy to craft metrics and do deep dives to see how your product is working. This has a huge ROI, because without metrics you're basically flying blind.
- You can also use Segment's event tracking to fuel your experimentation and AB testing strategies. AB testing is the best way to ship features in a tech product with confidence that you're making a positive impact.
The competitors above either charge a lot if you want to warehouse your data, don't allow data warehousing, or make it very difficult to warehouse your data (requiring you to write custom scripts and run them on schedulers). Segment makes it easy to warehouse your application's event data. Not only that, it allows you to warehouse 3rd party data sources. None of the competitors do that.