How edX modernizes its tech stack with Twilio Segment to easily and quickly access metrics for product, marketing, and business analytics needs.

The big win

Several different teams wanted to easily access metrics for product, marketing, and business analytics, but integrating with each tool required adding cumbersome, repetitive code to its site that would be difficult to maintain. Interested in understanding its signup funnel, edX wanted to capture important events, like when students viewed its course directory or registered for a class. The edX engineering team was spending hours to instrument code multiple times to send the same analytics events to each of its tools.

To overcome analytics integration and maintenance challenges, the edX team implemented Twilio Segment. Twilio Segment provided edX with a unified platform to easily integrate and turn on multiple third-party analytics and marketing tools, saving its engineers time and empowering business analysts.

edX is a trusted platform for education and learning. Founded by Harvard and MIT, edX is home to more than 20 million learners, the majority of top-ranked universities in the world and industry-leading companies. 

As a global nonprofit, edX is transforming traditional education, removing the barriers of cost, location and access. Supporting learners at every stage, whether entering the job market, changing fields, seeking a promotion or exploring new interests, edX delivers courses for curious minds on topics ranging from data and computer science to leadership and communications.

Spending too much time gathering insights for product and business analytics

Several different teams inside edX wanted to easily and quickly access metrics for product, marketing, and business analytics needs. Third-party tools like Google Analytics and Mixpanel could answer edX's BI and product development questions, but integrating with each service directly would have required adding cumbersome, repetitive code to its site that would be difficult to maintain.

Interested in understanding its signup funnel, edX wanted to capture important events, like when students viewed its course directory or registered for a class. The edX engineering team was spending hours to instrument code multiple times to send the same analytics events to each of its tools.

Implementing Twilio Segment to overcome analytics integrations and maintenance challenges

To overcome analytics integration and maintenance challenges, the edX team implemented Twilio Segment. Twilio Segment along with AWS provided edX with a unified platform to easily integrate and turn on multiple third-party analytics and marketing tools, saving its engineers time and empowering business analysts. In addition, Twilio Segment helped provide edX the security measures required to work with student data.

Twilio Segment saves engineers time traditionally spent instrumenting tools, and gives business analysts a complete set of customer data to slice and dice as they please. Whenever edX has a question about how to implement tracking or which tools to try, Twilio Segment’s success team is there to help.

Transforming the data infrastructure to get more visibility across product and business

Because edX sends its data through Twilio Segment’s single hub, each of its tools receives consistent data that is easier to analyze. With Twilio Segment, edX can quickly add new business intelligence events, clean up event flows, and add or change existing integrations.

Since edX implemented Twilio Segment, it can easily send its data to any app on the platform, or even to internal systems. To integrate a new tool, edX toggles it on in the Twilio Segment control panel, then copies in its account credentials. That’s it! Twilio Segment transforms and sends along its data automatically.