Segment Offers Great Data for a Great Price
July 01, 2020

Segment Offers Great Data for a Great Price

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Business

Overall Satisfaction with Segment

We use Segment to send all of our front-end usage data to our data warehouse, as well as sending key events to 3rd party ad, CRM, and other tools. We use the filtering functionality, the visual tagger, and some of the webhook functionality as well. It's used by marketing, data analytics, data engineering, and customer service, as well as our engineering/product teams.

Pros

  • Strongest catalog of integrations of tools of this nature.
  • Good support and service, good salespeople.
  • Reasonable pricing for what it is and the value created (comparable tools would cost significantly more).
  • Makes data warehouse-based analytics accessible to startup organizations.

Cons

  • Some connectors (EG HubSpot source) do not have necessary fields/data and it's unclear how to get these built out.
  • Some destination connectors have limitations and can require rework to make the data flowing thru Segment meet the requirements of the ad connectors.
  • Not much consistency across connectors.
  • At scale, can struggle with data volumes and loading data in one sync, causing data to change retroactively.
  • 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.
Segment is considerably cheaper but doesn't have the GUI for non-SQL users. GA Premium doesn't have all the data connectors, and can be more difficult to configure on SPAs.
Generally once the Segment team understands your question (which usually doesn't happen on the first ticket), after that they're very helpful.
Given the amount of external systems/connectors involved, often the issues lie with other companies and their data/structures.

Do you think Twilio Segment delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Twilio Segment's feature set?

Yes

Did Twilio Segment live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Twilio Segment go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Twilio Segment again?

Yes

  • Segment is great for companies that want to track their front-end actions with a high degree of granularity and send them to different tools and data warehouses.
  • If you have a high value per user, Segment can be very affordable for what it is.
  • Segment's pricing is per unique user, so if you run a lot of traffic (e.g. publishers, ultra-low value per visit and low LTV companies) that doesn't monetize effectively the pricing may not work for you.

Using Segment

Segment is used by a variety of people across our marketing/growth, customer experience, analytics, and engineering teams. As it's a foundational piece of our data platform, many people across the organization are stakeholders.
Very little is required to support it out of the box. Some light front-end development and permissions to add a data warehouse connector, plus some SQL skills are all that's really needed to get going. With the visual tagger, it likely doesn't even need front end resources.
If you want to do complex things with Segment, you'll need to assign more back-end (sending server-side events) and data engineering (flowing data thru pubsub, etc.) resources to do more.
We have brought in an external consultant to support Segment's Google Analytics/Google Tag Manager integration.

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