What is Segment?
Segment is a Customer Data Platform (CDP) designed to simplify the collection, transformation, and utilization of first-party customer data from various digital properties, including websites, mobile apps, servers, and cloud applications.
Key Functionality
- Data Collection: Segment enables the capture of user interaction data through its libraries and APIs. You can track events such as page views, button clicks, and other user actions by adding Segment code to your website, app, or server. This data is generated based on specific triggers you define and can range from simple page view tracking to complex event tracking within mobile apps.
- Data Transformation and Routing: Segment translates the collected data into different formats compatible with various tools and destinations, such as marketing, analytics, email, customer support, CRM, and data warehouses. This is achieved through its core product, Connections, which routes event data to downstream operational tools without requiring additional code changes.
- Data Archiving and Storage: Segment archives a copy of the collected data and can send it to your storage systems, such as databases, warehouses, or bulk-storage buckets. This ensures that your data is both accessible and secure.
Key Features
- Sources and Destinations: Segment operates on a model of Sources and Destinations. Sources send messages into Segment, while Destinations receive messages from Segment. This allows for seamless integration with a wide range of tools and platforms.
- Protocols and Schema Management: Segment’s Protocols feature helps in defining a unified schema for data collection, ensuring consistency and the right format for all incoming data. The Segment Spec outlines the structure and format for data collection, supporting six distinct API calls: Identify, Track, Page, Screen, Group, and Alias.
- Unify and Identity Resolution: The Unify feature uses identity resolution to combine data from various touchpoints into a single, coherent customer profile. This involves stitching together web, mobile, server, and third-party interactions to create a holistic view of each user.
- Audience Management and Engagement: Segment’s Twilio Engage (previously known as Engage) allows you to create customizable audiences based on user behavior or other metrics. These audiences can be automatically synced to downstream tools to power personalization across marketing channels. Additionally, Segment supports real-time audience building, although real-time audience syncing is limited to batch ingestion every 2-3 hours.
- Real-Time Capabilities: Segment offers real-time event collection and delivery to downstream destinations, particularly through server-side integrations. The Profile API also enables querying entire user or account objects programmatically for real-time personalization and marketing campaigns.
- Privacy and Security: Segment includes features like the Privacy Portal, which helps inspect incoming messages to identify and manage personally identifiable information (PII), ensuring compliance with regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.
Additional Capabilities
- Personalization and Marketing: Segment enables the creation of targeted ad campaigns and personalized customer experiences by aggregating data from multiple sources. It also includes propensity modeling algorithms to predict customer behavior and support for email marketing with features like frequency caps.
- Data-Driven Product Development: Segment facilitates data collection and analysis across marketing, management, and engineering teams, helping teams move faster, experiment more, and improve their KPIs while respecting user privacy.
In summary, Segment is a powerful CDP that streamlines data collection, transformation, and utilization, providing a unified view of customer data and enabling personalized marketing, data-driven product development, and real-time audience management.