[rexreed]

Can someone explain to me what Segment is and what it does? Even the website doesn't make it clear. What is it beyond analytics? Can someone clue me into why this is awesome or necessary? Am I dumb for not understanding this or a bad marketer?

[idunno246]

its integrations. you drop one javascript snippet in there, and instrument the app with their sdk.

Want google analytics? add it in their UI and its there. Mixpanel? Click a button. Trying a new ad network? Click a button.

Basically, all these SaaS companies want some bits of your data and have some custom integrations.. instead of needing an engineer to implement it your marketing team can edit a UI. And you do it once, so you don't hit as many 'oops we forgot/implemented wrong conversion tracking for Random Service X'

None of it is that hard to do, but there's probably better things your engineer should be doing. Also, as the engineer whose done it, on the tenth marketing platform integration the engineering team will hate the marketing team.

[robbiemitchell]

The real value IMHO is the server-side identification and custom Track events, not the JS tracker.

Being able to instrument marketing AND app events that move data around, and then arbitrarily use webhooks and third-party integrations to further move data around on-demand (e.g., via Zapier or customer.io) or in batch (e.g., nightly updates from Looker) is magical for business teams.

I say this as a member of a 6-person venture-funded startup. Segment has helped us massively leverage a small headcount.

[Zaheer]

This seems like a one-time problem during setup of someone's infrastructure. Is the one-time cost of doing these integrations really worth the monthly cost of Segment? There must be some other value they provide?

[wastedhours]

>> tenth marketing platform integration the engineering team will hate the marketing team

> one-time problem during setup of someone's infrastructure

As the marketer regularly making these requests, it's by no means a one-time problem, and I can attest to being hated by our tech team (for some reason they don't appreciate me hiding random JS code in our CMS to save on these requests either...).

GTM would solve many of the problems for us as we store all of our customer data in CRM anyway, but for other orgs that don't have a massive CRM policy, having an essentially outsourced data warehouse might be valuable.

[sb8244]

I think one of the big ones is that, if setup right, you should be able to change tracking tools and not change your frontend code. They may be banking on the setup cost to be potentially expensive (engineers time) but the buyers are not in engineering (so value the engineers time highly).

[IMTDb]

You are describing google tag manager, not segment.

[idunno246]

sure, segment is just a fancy tag manager. It's similar enough that they specifically have a page calling out the differences: https://segment.com/docs/guides/general/what-is-the-differen...

which amounts to, the data goes through them first, so "Because we store the data, we also have the ability to replay your historical data into new tools and give you acccess to your raw data in a SQL data warehouse."