Data teams play a crucial role in granting other departments access to valuable customer insights. To simplify this process, our latest feature release empowers data teams to grant marketing stakeholders self-service capabilities on governed data sets.
Data teams play a crucial role in granting other departments access to valuable customer insights. To simplify this process, our latest feature release empowers data teams to grant marketers and business stakeholders self-service capabilities on governed data sets. This eliminates the need for them to spend time on manual tasks like building integrations and managing ad-hoc requests.
At Segment, we focus on enhancing how data teams support marketers by enabling them to dedicate more resources to creating impactful profiles, audiences, and customer journeys. Our goal is to provide robust solutions that tackle customer data challenges head-on and offer smooth self-service access for the entire organization.
One of the biggest challenges facing data teams today goes beyond simply creating and monitoring data tables. It’s giving business teams and marketers access to data in a scalable way that will allow them to quickly build audience lists with a tool that knows the business’s data model as well as your best data analyst - without going through bottlenecks of submitting data requests to iterate on complex audience mappings.
That’s why we are bringing both Linked Audiences into general availability today and Linked Events later at the end of September. Both features are built on top of the Segment Data Graph and are designed to help data teams empower marketers with access to data in the warehouse without needing to submit a support ticket.
With Linked Audiences, marketers will leverage a no-code audience builder to navigate context-rich data relationships in the warehouse to activate complex audience data and turn it into ROI across campaigns in supported downstream tools.
Linked Events will be an add-on to our Unify package, which gives technical marketers the ability to take existing events and enrich them with data from the warehouse before sharing them with downstream destinations. This enables technical marketers to give use cases such as abandoned cart and transactional emails much more context without the help of data teams. For example, companies can enrich events generated from the website, app, etc., with details that exist in an Accounts table in the warehouse before being sent to a platform like Amplitude for analytics, ad platforms like LinkedIn for targeting, or Braze for email marketing campaigns.
Today, we are proud to highlight our continued investment in creating a world-class experience for our Reverse ETL users with our biggest bundled feature release since we launched.
While warehouse data unlocks powerful personalization use cases, the initial step of setting up Reverse ETL to send data from the warehouse to destinations across the stack doesn’t happen magically. However, we’re getting as close to magic as possible with a more streamlined, user-friendly experience to help warehouse-first users activate data from the warehouse faster.
This collection of features was put together to help accelerate time to value for our customers by making the lives of data teams easier at every part of the product. For starters, Functions Co-Pilot and Webhooks 2.0 are brand-new features that will vastly simplify building and integrating functions and webhooks across the whole platform - including Reverse ETL flows to custom destinations not currently listed in the Integration Catalog. Furthermore, Suggested Mappings will accelerate the generation of field mappings for Reverse ETL sources so you can activate data in third-party destinations faster.
With Functions Co-Pilot, users can use natural language prompts to generate Function code with AI across the whole platform - including generating Reverse ETL flows to send data from the data warehouse to custom destinations. Any user with Functions available in their workspace can access the Functions Co-Pilot right now, with the GA launching later in Q3.
Webhooks 2.0 introduces a no-code method of building webhooks to activate data from Reverse ETL sources to custom destinations for every kind of user. Webhooks 2.0 also complements Functions by supporting additional authentication methods for those with advanced customization requirements. Whether you’re a marketer, data analyst, product manager, or developer, you can set up custom integrations without waiting for limited IT resources for new data activation use cases. Webhooks 2.0 launches will launch to pilot soon. Contact your account rep for more information.
Data mappings is another critical and formerly time-consuming step to connecting the warehouse to downstream destinations. Suggested Mappings is a new AI-powered feature that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically generate suggested mappings between the columns in the data warehouse and the corresponding destination fields. Suggested Mappings drastically cuts down the time it takes to configure data coming from the warehouse to the requirements of third-party APIs from days to minutes, meaning that you can start activating that data in downstream destinations that much sooner. Suggested Mappings will support all destinations connected to the data warehouse and will launch to GA in late Q3.
Last up is our new integration with dbt. When putting your transformed data to work, Segment has you covered. With Segment’s new dbt extension and Reverse ETL, data scientists and engineers can pull in their existing dbt models and send that modeled data from the warehouse to all Segment supported destinations. By utilizing dbt and Reverse ETL together, businesses can develop and implement sophisticated models, such as propensity models or lead scoring systems, to drive tangible business outcomes in downstream tools. Segment’s dbt extension will be made generally available this quarter.
Security is a top priority for every organization and we have consistently built Segment with the highest security standards. As a leading CDP that services some of the world's most complex businesses, this includes connecting to the data warehouse and enabling customers to access Segment APIs.
Moving forward, customers will be able to:
Connect to Snowflake using key-pair authentication as an additional layer of security (GA)
Leverage OAuth when using Segment API resources like our tracking API (GA)
Privately connect between VPCs with AWS PrivateLink to keep traffic within the Amazon network to reduce data security risks (Private Beta)
Stop bad actors in their tracks with Destination IP Allowlisting to filter IP addresses at the network layer and reduce the risk of data being intercepted.
Realizing business value by successfully activating data from the warehouse depends on how reliable the pipeline is in delivering to the destination. Preventing failed syncs, downtime, or data loss is critical to building trust in your data and ensuring you are making essential data from the warehouse available to roles across the organization in downstream destinations.
To bring accountability to the data pipeline, we’ve built a comprehensive set of Observability tools that makes it easier to proactively evaluate, monitor, and be alerted in your preferred channels regarding the performance of your Reverse ETL, Linked Audience, or Storage Destination flows.
Proactively monitoring the pipeline enables you to prevent issues with warehouse data syncs before they happen, and if something goes wrong, you will be able to resolve it much more quickly without hunting down logs in different disconnected systems, hoping to find an answer quickly to get your pipelines running correctly. All the data you need about your pipelines are available in a simple, easy-to-use dashboard. Here’s a rundown of the tooling available for each feature:
Reverse ETL: We’re offering end-to-end metrics on data sync performance from the data warehouse within the Reverse ETL interface, as well as enhanced metrics on Load phase (such as retryable errors, delivered on first attempt vs retry, and public API Load phase metrics) if you’re syncing to an Actions Destination. You can also set alerts to monitor for sync volume and overall sync health.
Linked Audiences: You can now see end-to-end data flow metrics for Audience Activation events, explore the data created by the Audience Sync, and view destination health broken down by Audience. You can set alerts for activation events or to monitor destination health.
Storage Destinations: Finally, we will also support end-to-end data flow metrics for streaming sources connected to Storage Destinations as well as better reporting and evaluation for how these data syncs perform over time.
Each of these observability tools for the data warehouse will launch to public beta this quarter.
At Segment, we understand the role Git plays in a developer's workflow, thanks to its industry-standard version control capabilities. That’s why we're launching a native Git Sync extension to make it easier than ever to enable version control across your entire CDP, from managing data governance and quality to controlling your data warehouse configurations and Reverse ETL models.
This integration isn't about maintaining the status quo – it's about enhancing the developer experience. That’s why we’ve built a solution that tracks changes for versioning so that you can manage your Segment resources as code in your preferred Git provider. All the things you love with Git (think things like release automation and pull requests) are now available at your fingertips.
Segment’s Git Sync extension is generally available today.
Many of these features are already available to customers and are generally available today. Check out our documentation or reach out to your account team today to take advantage of these new features - designed to make your life easier and help your business grow.
Interested in seeing a few of these features in action? Register today for our upcoming product tour where we will walk through how teams can unlock revenue opportunities by securely activating data across the entire tech stack.
Our annual look at how attitudes, preferences, and experiences with personalization have evolved over the past year.