This week we’re very excited to share a brand new part of Segment with you: the Tracking Plan. It’s the easiest way to organize and manage all of your customer data.
For the first couple years at Segment we solved most of our biggest business problems using regular ol’ gut instinct. Everyone was in constant conversation with our initial customers, so it was okay to use intuition to choose our pricing model or prioritize new features. But as we’ve grown, we needed a more analytical approach. About six months ago we started using SQL for analysis, and that’s completely changed how we answer questions about our business.
Email is the unsung hero of user engagement. While Snapchat and Yo! may be fun and flashy, 77% of consumers still prefer to receive marketing messages via email, and no other channel even comes close.
Analyzing your behavioral data in a SQL database with tools like Segment SQL and Looker gives you a few key advantages: You can customize all of your analysis to match your individual business – like defining user sessions based on how people use your product. And, you can make sure that you’re accurately connecting anonymous and logged in users with a universal ID.
At Segment, we help companies record and manage their customer data. Our API has three basic methods: identify, track, and page/screen. These methods describe facts about customers. We often get asked why we don’t support recording sessions, and the short answer is that sessions aren’t facts, they’re stories.
This post is the second in a three-part series from Looker, a Segment SQL partner, sharing strategies to solve common analytics conundrums. On to user sessions!
Our awesome customer, David Cook from Jut, graces the blog to tell us how he created an actionable product usage display with event tracking + Segment + Keen + LED lights. Read on!
We welcome Erin Franz, data analyst at Looker, to the Segment blog! This is the first post in her three part series sharing practical advice for common analytics conundrums: accurately identifying users, creating sessions for user activity, and event path analysis.
In November, we announced a brand new product, Segment SQL, that transforms and loads your customer behavioral data directly into a hosted database powered by Amazon Redshift. This means you can go directly from a track call on your website and mobile app, to a cross-platform relational database, without lifting a finger.
Today we welcome CEO and co-founder of Kahuna, Adam Marchick, to the Segment blog! Kahuna is a kick-A push notification and analytics tool that’s now available on Segment! Check out the docs to get started. Now, onto tips for building user-centric notficiations!
Like many startups, we’re experimenting with traction channels to discover what will drive our next stage of growth. But before we could test user acquisition, we had to answer an important question.
Nathan comes to Segment after being the first engineer at
HackReactor. He’s spent time doing everything
from running their infrastructure to teaching new students the finer points of
asynchronous programming.
Janessa Lantz from RJMetrics – a Segment SQL partner – shares marketing and product tips for engaging, retaining and learning from your best customers.
Hailing from the Emerald Isle, Frank Higgins joins Segment after an incredibly successful career at Twilio, where his deep technical depth helped him find smart, fair and economical options for customers.
Your analytics are only as good as the data you’re tracking. And deciding what to track is the hardest part about making your data useful. It’s overwhelming to create a tracking plan from scratch, so this article will give you a head start.
We welcome Derek Steer, CEO of Mode, to the Segment blog! Mode is a SQL integration partner and has created these open source queries so you can start learning ASAP. The best part? Their playbooks are tailor-made for the Segment SQL schema.
We welcome Harry Glaser, CEO of our SQL partner Periscope, to the Segment blog! Harry’s talking cross-database joins on the heels of our Amazon Redshift launch. If you want to analyze behavioral data across platforms, and Excel won’t cut it, here are some tips to level-up your analytics game.
Early this year we visited our customers in New York City and asked “what do you do with your raw analytics logs from Segment?” Five straight companies independently told us that a team of their best engineers were laboriously transforming and loading their raw Segment logs into Amazon Redshift.
We’re super excited to welcome and introduce you to Laylee! As our Office Manager and newest addition to the People Team, she’s handling all the office operations that keep Segment afloat. We’d definitely be a big ol’ mess without her.
We’re pretty psyched to announce that Dominic Barnes has joined the Segment team! Dominic joins us from Tulsa, Oklahoma and will be hacking on a bunch of different parts of the Segment stack!
Another member of the Aussie crew, Harriet joins the team after journeying from her native Brisbane, AU. Previously, she worked at GBST adding a bit of flair and panache their angular apps.
With our list of partners growing to over 100 these days, Sam has joined Segment to lead our partnership efforts! Sam is also a key member of our goofy and subversive Australian contingent. Back in Australia he was a founder at Feedback Loop and Local Gadgets, and he’s stoked to take on the challenge of helping us work faster, better, stronger with all of our partners.
Today we have some exciting news to share with you! Segment has raised a $15 million Series A from Accel, Kleiner Perkins and e.ventures. This new funding means we get to invest heavily in our mission: making your customer data a joy to use!
At Segment, we believe you should be able to use your data effortlessly, no matter where that data is collected – your website, your mobile app, your TV streaming service, and now your smartwatch app, too!
We’re excited to announce that Steven Miller has joined the Segment team as a success engineer. If you’ve sent us a note recently, you’ve probably already heard from him! Steven likes to build things, make them better, and help other people do the same. You guessed it - he’s a perfect fit for the success team.
Andy is our newest addition to the success engineering team and has been hard at work making customers happy. With experience ranging from Citibank to Twilio, Andy is well versed in both business and tech. Another perfect fit for the Segment team!
Last week, we announced new support for popular ecommerce platforms including Goodsie, a stylish store builder with neat customers like Church of Merch, The Boomcase, and Strolby. We sat down with Jonathan Marcus, founder and CEO of Goodsie, and Jeremy Mora, founder and CEO of Church of Merch, to learn more about how merchants are using Segment on the Goodsie platform.
Last week we announced new ecommerce plugins for online merchants to integrate analytics and marketing tools with zero code. Here’s a conversation with our platform partner at WooCommerce, Joel Bronkowski. He’s given us the inside scoop on WooCommerce, the Segment plugin, and why WooThemes follows the model build, measure, learn. Read on to learn more!
It’s our pleasure to welcome Chris Surdi to the sales team! A seasoned closer and entrepreneur, Chris comes to us from Braintree. He’s been busy learning how Segment makes engineers and marketers’ lives much easier, and is ready to hit the ground running to help Segment grow.
Today, we announced new support for online retailers to get up and running with analytics in minutes. Our plugins for Magento, WooCommerce, WP eCommerce, and Goodsie ecommerce platforms let online merchants install Segment, and turn on any tool they want to use in seconds. And, our Ecommerce API sits underneath the plugins and works for any company that’s selling stuff online.
Our goal is to make collecting and routing analytics data easy so you don’t have to think about it. Rather than dealing with the minutiae of analytics implementation, pixels, and weird archaic javascript libraries, you should be able to spend time using your data to make your store better and get more customers.
We’re excited to announce that custom builds are now available on Android! Custom builds give you the power to chose which integrations get included in your application, minimizing your app’s total size, as you might have seen from our iOS library.
We couldn’t be more excited to welcome Chris Sperandio to Segment as our first success engineer! Chris loves nothing more than helping people. You may have already met him replying to support tickets, squashing bugs and making customers’ lives easier. Chris has great experience in digital media, analytics and web development, and has been an advocate of Segment since our humble beginnings.
Our first teammate with a badass Southern accent, Garrett Johnson joins us as a backend engineer. He hails from the beautiful town of Charlotte, North Carolina and has already shipped key improvements to our data ingestion and logging infrastructure!
This week, we’re welcoming Becky to our customer success team! She’ll be working closely with our enterprise customers, giving advice on the latest and greatest tools and making sure we’re providing top notch service.
Diana is Segment’s first marketer, and an awfully brave soul, because Segment is brutally difficult to explain! She’s been talking with customers, writing case studies, and consolidating our messaging into beautiful, clear prose. She joins us from the world of PR, and will be leading a bunch of exciting product launches coming up!
JD joins Segment as the latest addition to our sales team! He’s been helping companies learn how Segment works and getting people up and running. After we close a deal, we ask JD to take a look at the contract, because he has a J.D.! He joins us from the world of corporate law, and is excited to get his hands dirty in the startup scene.
Prateek is our new main man on Android! He’s been hard at work building Android integrations, shrinking the size of the SDK and making it more modular. He’s also working on the java library!
Lance is joining as a frontend engineer! So far he’s been hard at work building new analytics.js integrations like Bronto, Rockerbox, Bing Ads and ShareASale. He’s also vastly improved analytics.js itself so that we can deliver more integrations, faster!
Hello Bar is a free optimization tool that allows you to show the right message at the right time to your website visitors. We’ve made it easy to load your hello bar through Segment.io - all you need is your API Key!
After working closely with the Facebook Ads team we’ve released support for Facebook Custom Audiences. Now Segment.io users can use audiences without code changes!
Now Segment.io users can start loading Alexa without changing any code. Just add your Account ID and Domain into your Alexa settings inside of Segment.io and we’ll do the rest!
We’ve just released support for CommandIQ. CommandIQ makes marketing automation easy. Works with email, push notifications, and SMS. Built and priced for companies at scale.
This is a super late posting: Amir has been shipping dozens of integrations and is already responsible for analytics.js (which runs on hundreds of millions of computers every month), the CDN and large parts of our API endpoint infrastructure.
This is quite a late posting, since Julian has been building all kinds of things here since the beginning of January! Most visibly, he built the new real-time debugger, and has been writing about the technology under the hood. He’s got some new stuff cooking that we’ll be ready to announce soon!
On April 7th (yesterday), a new zero-day vulnerability in OpenSSL was revealed, dubbed the “Heartbleed“ exploit. It allows the attacker to read a random 64-kilobyte section of memory from any server accepting SSL connections with a compromised version of OpenSSL. We’ve patched the vulnerability in our service and taken steps to avoid further information leakage.
This is the first part of a series about our newest feature: the live debugger! Here is how we used the new Server-Sent Events standard to implement the real-time stream that helps you debug all of the calls going through our servers.
We’re happy to announce an integration with MailChimp! MailChimp is a popular and simple email service provider. We use it here at Segment.io to send out our blog and academy emails.
One of the most popular logging libraries for node.js is Winston. Winston is a great library that lets you easily send your logs to any number of services directly from your application. For lots of cases Winston is all you need, however there are some problems with this technique when you’re dealing with mission critical nodes in a distributed system. To solve them we wrote a simple solution called Yet-Another-Logger.
We’re announcing our integration with Google Adwords today! You can now trigger your Adwords conversion pixels through Segment.io, without writing any new code!
Every month we’re going to do a round-up of all the projects we’ve open-sourced on Github. We
have hundreds of projects available for anyone to use, ranging from CSS libraries and UI components
to static-site generators and server tools. Not to mention that Segment.io all started from analytics.js.
Today we’re also announcing support for Bronto. Bronto is a marketing automation tool for e-commerce, letting you send triggered emails to your customers based on how they behave. This can be a clutch way to convert potential customers who abandoned their shopping cart just before checkout.
Today we’re announcing support for Curebit! If you’re an e-commerce company, Curebit can help you get more social referrals and drive them to purchase. They can help you set up a referral program that drives people to share your e-commerce site with friends, then help you measure results and tune the system.
We’re finally announcing an integration with Lucky Orange! Lucky Orange is an analytics tool focused on qualitative data. It gives you visitor heatmaps, visitor polls, visit recordings, and live chat. Here’s a quick demo of how their screen recordings can help you capture problems with your site:
We’re happy to announce the release of Segment.io organizations. You can now group multiple Segment.io projects under one organization, invite as many teammates as you want, and manage all your account settings and billing in one place. Organizations are perfect for startups and large companies alike.
Jenn comes to us from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and is going to be handling operations at Segment.io HQ — including forcing all of us to develop a love of “chile”, not to be mistaken for “chili”.
TJ comes to us after building a bunch of badass real-time stuff with the CloudUp crew. At Segment.io he’ll be heading up our Victoria office, aka taking control of as many coffee shops in the greater Canada area as possible.
When we analyze usage and customers and Segment.io, we constantly need to join queries across Mongo and Redis. Why? Because our account information is in Mongo and our API usage is in Redis. Today we’re open sourcing Hydros. It’s a quick cheat to let us run SQL queries for analysis, while using NoSQL in production.
Hot on the heels of the new team page, we just released an updated version of our home page. This is another part of the complete overhaul we’re giving the site.
Jake comes to Segment.io after running his own wildly successful analytics consultancy, Dirty Analytics, where he helped companies integrate analytics tools and analyze their data, oftentimes with Segment.io!
Want to get to know the lovable team being Segment.io? Well now you can! Last Friday we launched our new team page. It’s the first of many pages to get a facelift over the next couple of months.
Raphael comes to Segment.io from a mobile app analytics startup. Here at Segment.io he’ll be working with our enterprise customers to make sure they’re getting a kickass analytics setup.
We add new integrations to Segment.io all the time, and if there’s one thing you all are vocal about it’s, “tell us about the new hotness!” So we’re starting a new series that will deliver exactly that!
Just wanted to let you know that we’ve added five new integrations to Segment.io that you can try out with the flip of a switch on your integrations page!
We added a new Segment.io integration: Spinnakr! Spinnakr shows you the top traffic spikes for your website in a crazy simple layout. Then, you can display targeted messages directly on your website to these specific people to increase your conversion.
We added a new Segment.io integration: Inspectlet! Inspectlet lets you see eye-tracking heatmaps, screen recordings of visitor sessions, and real-time analytics. That sounds pretty cool, but what does all this mean for you?
Wow, we’ve been so focused and busy (productive!) over the last few months that we forgot to tell you about all the new integrations you can now add to your arsenal! You might have noticed them popping up out of the blue. In upcoming blog posts, we’ll show you how to best use each one:
One of the biggest benefits to switching to Segment.io is that you’re no longer locked-in to any single analytics tool. Today, we’re taking that one step farther. Our new Webhooks integration lets you get your raw data in real-time, anywhere you want!
Optimizely has been our most requested integration by far, and today I’m happy to announce that it has finally arrived! With the flip of a switch, you can send your events and revenue directly to Optimizely, and we’ll also sync your Optimizely data back to all of your other Segment.io integrations!
Our friends at Outbound believe that automated messages should be plumbing, not rocket science. They can help you instantly turn your analytics events into sms, push, voice, or email product notifications. Today, we’re excited to announce them as our newest integration!
Five months ago, we released a small library called Analytics.js by submitting it to Hacker News. A couple hours in it hit the #1 spot, and over the course of the day it grew from just 20 stars to over 1,000. Since then we’ve learned a ton about managing an open-source library, so I wanted to share some of those tips.
We’re happy to announce that we just released our newest premium service: our Omniture integration. Omniture is the premier E-Commerce tool for tracking user behavior, and it’s used by tons of large businesses worldwide.
Qualaroo is a survey tool that helps you “understand and address the real issues that prevent conversions”. We’re excited to announce that the Qualaroo integration on Segment.io is now available.
Three days ago, our friends at Heap Analytics unveiled their new approach to analytics on Hacker News. HN loved it, and people asked us when we’re adding support for Heap. Today we’re happy to announce that Heap is available immediately via Segment.io.
We’re excited to announce that we’ve just launched our newest premium tool: our Salesforce integration! Salesforce is the market leader in customer relationship management (CRM) software. Lots and lots of busisnesses use it to organize their sales team, and keep track of their company’s leads, accounts, and opportunities.
It’s been said that “constraints drive creativity.” If that’s true, then PHP is a language which is ripe for creative solutions. I just spent the past week building our PHP library for Segment.io, and discovered a variety of approaches used to get good performance making server-side requests.
Ever since we launched our first six server-side analytics libraries, we’ve been getting mobbed by requests for a PHP library and a WordPress plugin. Well, I’m happy to say that we’ve added support for both. Now you can use the same, clean API in even more places!
Today we’re happy to announce that we’ve just released another premium add-on: our Marketo integration. Marketo is a popular lead-nurturing and lead management system. It helps you keep track of all your leads, syncs them with Salesforce, and keeps your users engaged with in-depth marketing compaigns.
Over the last week we’ve gotten lots of requests for specific integrations. Four new integrations are now available under your integrations tab, and you can toggle them off and on at will!
Right before Christmas we launched analytics.js on HackerNews and the support has been tremendous! In just 24 hours the repo broke 1,000 Github stargazers, and since then the community has helped us add new integrations. But we’re just getting started, and we’re super excited to share an even easier way to integrate analytics with you.
We launched with 6 analytics providers integrated on Monday. Today we’re announcing 3 new integrations! Many thanks go to Klaviyo, Hubspot and GoSquared for jumping on it and integrating practically overnight.
David Cook
Sam Johnson
Sylvie Bryant
Ilya and Ian
