Segment is one of the fastest ways to start with a customer data platform and is the go-to CDP for companies that want to quickly activate customers across all stages of the customer journey. Here's why: Segment centralizes your marketing scripts, reducing the load on users' browsers, and helps route events to hundreds of downstream destinations and warehouses. However, Segment is a complex platform with important considerations. We'll guide you through deploying a robust CDI on Segment, helping you avoid pitfalls like excessive MTU counts.
Combining Segment with Metabase and Omni Analytics
The core of our service is a robust Segment implementation, enhanced with several key features to maximize its value. Our primary focus is on implementing tracking with Segment's dedicated SDKs, often configuring Unify, and occasionally Protocols. Additionally, we deploy a private Omni Analytics instance from Omni CDI to ingest third-party webhook events as payloads following Segment's tracking schema, avoiding excessive MTU usage. Finally, we set up metric models and run Metabase aggregate dashboards. This stack ensures efficient Segment usage and prevents excessive MTU consumption.
Tracking up and running without any custom infra
We capture first-party events preferentially via server-side sinks using Segment's SDKs and third-party events using Omni Analytics, which cleans, structures, and writes the payloads into Segment sources.
Activation and warehousing on unified data
We employ Protocols and Unify assuming a proper pricing plan, and connect events to the specified segment destinations and warehouses, with a preference for BigQuery.
Dashboards your own, no 3rd party
Keep track of overall metrics and insights using a dashboard linked to your private Metabase. Receive instant alerts if any metrics raise a red flag.
Segment is quick to start and easy to run
Unlike Snowplow or Omni CDI, Segment is a SaaS, operating outside your cloud and eliminating the need for a dedicated team to manage infrastructure. This makes Segment the fastest CDP to implement, iterate, and maintain, provided you have detailed payload specs for all downstream tools. However, this convenience comes with a monthly subscription fee. To avoid cost surprises, we help you select the best pricing plan, noting that advanced features like Single View of the Customer and Data Governance require the Business plan. Our service includes Omni Analytics to reduce MTU consumption and costs, and Metabase with custom metric models to drive your business forward. This approach empowers your marketing team to thrive amidst the challenges of 2024.
Tracking from all sources
We utilize Segment's SDKs for handling both first-party and third-party events, alongside Omni Analytics for enriching and validating third-party data. Segment's SDKs collect website and CRM data, while Omni Analytics formats events from third-party sources to align with Segment's data model and forwards them to Segment sources. This approach guarantees data availability across all destinations, ensuring comprehensive coverage beyond server-side sources alone.
MTU minimized
We reuse Segment's anonymousId across all data sources to minimize MTU consumption. This is why we integrate Omni Analytics with enrichment logic into your cloud environment. To ensure high-quality data downstream, we implement schema controls, filters, and use the Integrations object to direct events to regional endpoints tailored to your business requirements. All tracking requests are proxied through your domain for enhanced control and security. Source configurations are replicated across environments (development, production, and testing) to maintain separate sets, preventing test data from reaching production warehouses or activation processes downstream.
Complete coverage
Our Segment CDI ensures complete setup and optimization of Unify, Identity Resolution, Profile API, and Destinations under the appropriate Segment pricing plan. We unify activities across channels with Unify, use Identity Resolution for real-time data merging, and create unified profiles for Destinations. The Profile API enables segmentation and targeting by sourcing user components, Computed Traits, and Audiences from various channels. We integrate identity-resolved profiles with your data warehouse via Profiles Sync. Destinations are configured to streamline data flow to your business tools and analytics platforms, leveraging data from client-side and server-side sources, including those enhanced by Omni Analytics.
Private metric model and reporting platform on Metabase
Segment simplifies data integration into warehouses with dedicated connectors and selective sync for Business plan users. However, historical event data updates and transformation of old formats aren't supported. To address this, a control layer is essential between raw Segment data and your dashboard metrics. Real-time dashboards aren't feasible due to sync frequencies: daily for Free, twice daily for Team, and continuous for Business plans. To overcome these challenges, we develop custom metric models that bridge raw data with your Metabase dashboard. These models populate a private Metabase instance on Segment's warehouse, delivering precise, tailored metrics from aggregated data.
Segment CDI custom-built components
Your infrastructure will utilize multiple pre-built components that we've open-sourced or made available to our clients. Here are the highlighted ones that we use in Snowplow CDI's.
Omni Segment Plugin for WordPress
Our custom-built WordPress plugin integrates Segment client-side and server-side (using PHP source) and collects and dispatches a number of events, including all key events from WooCommerce. It is closed-source and available upon request for clients.
Omni Analytics Segment Data Client
Segment client, built into the Dockerized instances of Omni Analytics platforms as part of Omni CDI, structures and dispatches events to server-side Segment sinks. It is used to capture, structure, enrich, and dispatch discrete events from third-party sources into your Segment destination without causing excessive MTU usage.
The first step is a PoC
We create a Segment-based customer data platform with a PoC approach. We launch with a quick PoC in 3 weeks, then make improvements in 2-week steps based on what's most important to you. You can choose how many steps you need to make your system better, even none if your team can make it better on their own. Let's schedule a call to get started.
