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Ugh. This is only tangentially related, but Segment has always looked great, but is so incredibly, ridiculously overpriced for web analytics. If you want to sl

Ugh. This is only tangentially related, but Segment has always looked great, but is so incredibly, ridiculously overpriced for web analytics. If you want to slap it on your website for basic analytics, you better not get any traffic to speak of, because they charge you about $.01 per monthly tracked user, anonymous or identified. If you get 100k visitors per month (not even THAT much), it's $1,125/mo. Their pricing estimator stops at $2,375 / month for 225k monthly tracked users. God forbid you put it on your site or in your mobile app and then anything you do goes viral. It'll bankrupt you. Who on earth is this aimed at? Is this only suitable for tracking logged in users? Or only suitable for enterprise companies? Better yet, what about what they're doing is so difficult and expensive, when many of the places you'd be sending these analytics (which will be handling the same number of events) are free or cheap at this level of use? Segment has always seemed cool, but overpriced for web analytics by a factor of 20-50x. OK, rant over.

cosmie 8y ago
I've only worked with one account/client that used Segment specifically, so I can't speak authoritatively about what their primary market segment is. But it fills a really valuable hole for anyone that spends a decent amount on paid media. Having conversion and tracking data funnel through Segment has two benefits: 1. Every ad network has it's own conversion tracking system, and Segment makes it a whole lot easier to ad in another one that marketing wants to test out 2. It enforces a semblance of consistency. Implementation can have a very large impact on analysis. Whether intentional or incidental, it's really easy to implement analytics code inconsistently. Then the business/marketing user is evaluating results between campaigns/platforms/agencies/etc as if it's apples to apples, and it turns out it was implemented like apples to oranges. Standardizing events with Segment and then forcing tracking events based on those neatly ensures a level of consistency between services that's hard to achieve otherwise. #2 is the biggest problem I've ran into managing clients' web analytics. My goto solution is to leverage a tag manager, work on mapping out significant actions and creating triggers for those, and then making sure as much as possible is driven by those standardized triggers and anything one-off is scrutinized appropriately. But that process is easier said than done, since the friction to create new triggers is low and just requires appropriate GTM access. With Segment, making a completely new event involves an actual development release and is harder for a business user or agency to push through nonchalantly. $0.01/visitor is not insignificant but in that environment (which is not all that rare), something like Segment is invaluable. Plus, don't assume cost scales linearly with the same variable as publicized pricing. Have never been privy to a Segment contract, but part of the "Call Us" component is to ensure hte unit economics of the product make sense to your business. MTU is the unit they chose for automated pricing tiers listed, but there are other variables like the number of sources/destinations, number of seats, etc are negotiable. High volume of MTUs but just a handful of sources/destinations? Can probably get a contract structured with a very low MTU price but a negotiated max active destinations with a per-destination charge over that. Your MTU peaky? Can likely get those to roll over or have the MTU measured against a per-month average over a quarterly basis. Allowing your peaky periods to be offset by your down periods. Don't view the Business custom pricing option as only for super huge spenders - a lot of companies are willing to work with you when you're smaller in hopes to structure a contract that'll grow annually as you grow. Custom pricing doesn't always mean super expensive, it also means "atypical unit economics". And also happens to be a market research tool to help companies discover use cases they hadn't thought about (hence why their standard pricing differentiator didn't work for it).
tomnipotent 8y ago
Segment isn't a web analytics tool, so much as a data dispatching service. Send data to Segment, which in turn sends it to the services you have configured. Think of it as a central data store for your business that has built-in integrations to move that data to other providers such as Google Analytics, Salesforce, Mailchimp etc.
- ryanwaggoner 8y ago
  Yep, that’s what makes it so cool and useful. But if one of those services is Google Analytics, for example, then you probably want to use it with all visitors, which is excruciatingly expensive if you get hardly any traffic at all.

cosmie 8y ago

I've only worked with one account/client that used Segment specifically, so I can't speak authoritatively about what their primary market segment is. But it fills a really valuable hole for anyone that spends a decent amount on paid media. Having conversion and tracking data funnel through Segment has two benefits: 1. Every ad network has it's own conversion tracking system, and Segment makes it a whole lot easier to ad in another one that marketing wants to test out 2. It enforces a semblance of consistency. Implementation can have a very large impact on analysis. Whether intentional or incidental, it's really easy to implement analytics code inconsistently. Then the business/marketing user is evaluating results between campaigns/platforms/agencies/etc as if it's apples to apples, and it turns out it was implemented like apples to oranges. Standardizing events with Segment and then forcing tracking events based on those neatly ensures a level of consistency between services that's hard to achieve otherwise. #2 is the biggest problem I've ran into managing clients' web analytics. My goto solution is to leverage a tag manager, work on mapping out significant actions and creating triggers for those, and then making sure as much as possible is driven by those standardized triggers and anything one-off is scrutinized appropriately. But that process is easier said than done, since the friction to create new triggers is low and just requires appropriate GTM access. With Segment, making a completely new event involves an actual development release and is harder for a business user or agency to push through nonchalantly. $0.01/visitor is not insignificant but in that environment (which is not all that rare), something like Segment is invaluable. Plus, don't assume cost scales linearly with the same variable as publicized pricing. Have never been privy to a Segment contract, but part of the "Call Us" component is to ensure hte unit economics of the product make sense to your business. MTU is the unit they chose for automated pricing tiers listed, but there are other variables like the number of sources/destinations, number of seats, etc are negotiable. High volume of MTUs but just a handful of sources/destinations? Can probably get a contract structured with a very low MTU price but a negotiated max active destinations with a per-destination charge over that. Your MTU peaky? Can likely get those to roll over or have the MTU measured against a per-month average over a quarterly basis. Allowing your peaky periods to be offset by your down periods. Don't view the Business custom pricing option as only for super huge spenders - a lot of companies are willing to work with you when you're smaller in hopes to structure a contract that'll grow annually as you grow. Custom pricing doesn't always mean super expensive, it also means "atypical unit economics". And also happens to be a market research tool to help companies discover use cases they hadn't thought about (hence why their standard pricing differentiator didn't work for it).

tomnipotent 8y ago

Segment isn't a web analytics tool, so much as a data dispatching service. Send data to Segment, which in turn sends it to the services you have configured. Think of it as a central data store for your business that has built-in integrations to move that data to other providers such as Google Analytics, Salesforce, Mailchimp etc.

ryanwaggoner 8y ago
Yep, that’s what makes it so cool and useful. But if one of those services is Google Analytics, for example, then you probably want to use it with all visitors, which is excruciatingly expensive if you get hardly any traffic at all.