What’s new at Twilio Segment: Tracking plan labels, SQL traits, and more integrations

At Segment we spend a lot of time focused on helping customers do fantastic things with their customer data. Whether it’s helping you transform any tool into an account-based tool or alerting you when someone updates your tracking plan, we’ve been hard at work to ensure Segment helps you use data better.

Here’s a roundup of the latest features, product updates, and integrations at Segment.

Connections

Check out some of our latest integrations:

• Singular: Segment customers can now effortlessly adopt Singular without the need to add code or an SDK to their apps. Singular's Marketing Intelligence Platform helps marketers drive growth by automatically unifying campaign data from thousands of sources with attribution data to uncover ROI across the customer journey.

• Proof: Proof’s newest product—Experiences—helps B2B SaaS companies increase trials and demos by delivering delightfully personalized experiences to their visitors. You can create raving fans by dynamically delivering the perfect website content or signup funnel for each visitor, add targeted banners, social proof, and more.

• UserIQ: Helps your organization to capture usage, engagement, and customer health data and puts that user-centric data into action. UserIQ helps your team facilitate onboarding to reduce implementation time, highlight new product features to expand user adoption, and improve time-to-value to increase customer retention.

• Dreamdata: Enables B2B companies to understand the revenue impact of every touch in their customer journey. Dreamdata uses your Segment data to deliver multitouch, account-based attribution.

Updating your workspace from the command line

Have a new team, product, or business unit coming soon? We now offer the ability to make bulk updates to your Segment workspace—including sources, destinations, and tracking plans—programmatically.The Config API allows you to provision your Segment workspace directly from your command line. Now you can choose to build and maintain Segment in the way that you want. Many customers, including Atlassian, have saved dozens of engineering hours by using the Config API.

Smoother analytics.js setup

We want customers to get set up with analytics.js as quickly as possible. As JavaScript frameworks continue to evolve, we want to provide best practices on instrumenting analytics on each of the most popular frameworks—Angular, React, and Vue. Take a look at our new Quickstart Guides that include step-by-step instructions and additional insights.

• Angular Quickstart Guide

• React Quickstart Guide

• Vue Quickstart Guide

Faster analytics.js loading times

Great things come in small(er) packages! We’ve improved the load time for our JavaScript source, analytics.js, by 15% on the initial load and up to 900% on subsequent loads.Faster load times are part of our ongoing efforts to help customers deliver great user experiences while continuing to optimize how they send data to and from Segment.

Protocols

Organize your tracking plan with labels

To help you organize and understand the events in your Protocols tracking plan, you can now add labels to indicate event priority, team ownership, or even platform. Because labels are flexible, you can create labels for whatever makes the most sense for your business. You can also filter events by label in your tracking plan, schema tab or the data validation report, enabling you to focus on relevant events. Learn more.Click to add a caption…

Omit unplanned properties

 Instead of blocking events that don’t fully adhere to your tracking plan, you can now choose to omit unplanned properties while retaining the properties you care about. For example, let’s say you specify that all “Product Viewed” events must include the properties SKU, category, and brand. If a Product Viewed event is sent with those properties and a property called test, Segment can automatically omit the test property from enabled cloud-mode destinations. That way, your planned properties will make it to your analytics and marketing tools, but any unplanned properties won’t. Learn more. 

Monitor changes to your tracking plans

 To help you monitor tracking plan updates, new events, and blocked or omitted properties, we added Protocols support to the activity feed. You can view the activity feed in the app or forward alerts to a Segment source. From there, you can send these alerts to your data warehouse for querying, or any cloud-mode destination. To get started, go to your workspace settings, and click on “Activity Feed Settings.” You’ll be able to select a source and enter email addresses for Protocols-specific alerts from this view. Learn more.These features are available to all customers currently using Protocols. If you want to learn more about how Protocols can help you protect the integrity of your data, get in touch.

Personas

SQL Traits

A new feature that allows you to use SQL to pull customer data directly from your warehouse into Personas and activate it in your marketing tools. With SQL Traits, you can unlock data in your warehouse that has previously been inaccessible to advertising, marketing automation, and out-of-the-box analytics tools such as object cloud source data, historical sales data from POS systems, or totally new predictions from your data science team. Read the blog for more information.

Account-based traits and audiences

This is a popular request from the B2B companies we work with. We added support for Accounts in Personas, which turns any tool on the Segment platform into an account-based tool. The feature gives you the option to view and query account profiles and create computed traits or audiences at the account-level. See how people are using it!

Audience exploration

Want to get a quick read on users who have submitted a demo request, but never returned to your site? No problem! On each computed trait and audience page in Personas, you can now easily determine what users are included with a mini user explorer and how that audience size has changed.

List support for Marketo, SFMC, and Sendgrid

To help you create better campaigns faster, we have added list support for three popular destinations: Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Marketo, and Sendgrid. This makes it easier than ever to create behavior-based audiences in Personas and use them to run personalized campaigns.

Other improvements:

• New activation configuration: You can now choose to send your traits or audiences to downstream tools as an identify call, configurable track call, or both. This enables you to understand better when users are moving in and out of audiences in end tools.

• Audience builder enhancements: You now have access to a calendar date picker for time-bound audiences, source-filters to control what data you’re using to create audiences, and relative property references, which allows you to compare the relationship of two user characteristics when building an audience.

• Added user explorer context: We’ve restructured the user and account profiles to make them more accessible. Computed traits and audiences are now broken out into their own tabs so you can quickly see what audiences and traits are being computed within Personas.

These features are available to all customers currently using Personas. If you want to learn more about how Personas can help you understand and engage your users, get in touch.

We’re always making updates to Segment! To see everything for yourself, log in to your workspace.New to Segment and want to learn more? Request a personalized demo.