Hey all, I'm managing the implementation of a customer data platform and headless CMS for a digital consumer content publisher. We're weighing up the pros and cons of implementing an OTB activation platform like Optimizely Recommendations or Dynamic Yield vs developing a bespoke solution for personalising content recommendations. Use Case is CDP will house customers and personas, and headless CMS will contain the individual content assets. The intermediary solution will activate data between the two for personalisation of news content feeds. I saw GCP has some potentially applicable personalisation solutions such as recommendations AI, which seem to be targeted at retail, but would probably be relevant to this use case for all intents and purposes. The CDP is Segment and the CMS is Contentstack. Has anyone implemented an activation platform or personalisation solution under similar circumstances? Any advice or direction would be appreciated! Thank you
Segment
Hi,
This is a question for best practice regarding Segment and Google Tag Manager. I would love to use Segment and GTM together when we need to implement a lot of additional tools, such as Amplitude, Appsfyler, or any other engagement tool since we can send event data without additional SDK implementation, etc.
So, my question is, if you use Segment and Google Tag Manager, how did you define what you will push through Segment and what will you push through Google Tag Manager? For example, when implementing a Facebook Pixel or any other 3rd party marketing tag?
From my point of view, implementing marketing pixels should stay in GTM because of the tag/trigger control.
If you are using Segment and GTM together, I would love to learn more about your best practice.
Thanks!
Hello Iva,
I think it is a good exercise to think about this framework once you start to add tags, triggers, and parameters and connect data between different tools (Amplitude, Google Ads, Linkedin Ads, Twitter Ads). I really love a post where Daniel Wolchonok shared a video about the Data Stack at Reforge (https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6963174688554414080/). My suggestion and what I see in other startups, centralise everything in one platform, Segment, and then send data whatever you need. Allow Google Tag Manager to be the tool for marketers and don't allow them to use Segment (I am a marketer). It is good that marketers have the freedom to set up tags and triggers for conversions and audiences but it is good that they don't have access to everything. So, I found it very simple to do it that way, Segment for everything and then connect Segment with Google Tag Manager where Google Tag Manager will allow marketers to work on the events, conversions, tracking, pixels, etc.
I hope you find this helpful. I will try to work on creating basic documentation to collect all of that information. I found really interesting for many startups at the beginning.
Cheers,
Hi there, we are a seed-stage startup in the personal development space. I am looking at building the marketing stack tool to have an accurate view of the user experience from acquisition through to adoption and retention for our upcoming React Native Mobile app. We qualify for the startup program of Segment and Mixpanel, which seems like a good option to get rolling and scale for free to learn how our current 60K free members will interact in the new subscription-based platform. I was considering AppsFlyer for attribution, and I am now looking at an affordable yet scalable Mobile Marketing tool vs. building in-house. Braze looks great, so does Leanplum, but the price points are 30K to start, which we can't do. I looked at OneSignal, but it doesn't have user flow visualization. I am now looking into Urban Airship and Iterable. Any advice would be much appreciated!
You might already made you decision, but for us Intercoms new journey builder combined with Zapier really makes a strong competitor at a fair price towards Braze. We use tags in the journey builder to fire of zaps for example sms etc. Intercom also offers a startup pricing at 49 dollars for everything the first year. The downside is they only have support through chat/email, no phone support and sometimes they are pretty slow.
Are there affordable incrementally billed integration options that support web notifications, mobile notifications, email, sms, site/service/app inbox and optionally facebook messenger channels for messaging from a similar API?
I'm looking to integrate a CDP into our Martech and eventually throughout the organization. We're starting to evaluate Segment, Tealium , and Adobe Experience Manager. Does anyone have experience with these tools? How easy was the onboarding/selection process? Was it challenging to explain the difference between DMP and CDP with leadership?
Obviously, it will not be possible to advice here with little or no knowledge on the business needs. Every tool has it's pros and cons, and largely depends on specific needs. I can add few on Adobe Experience Manager (tool i've been working on for over 5 years): 1. AEM is an expensive tool (also consulting, dev teams come at high price) 2. Adobe is pushing a lot towards moving AEM into cloud. Most of your work will be on Adobe Cloud, though there maybe very few exceptions for some customers to have on-premise implementations. 3. There will be a steep learning curve. 4. Some of the advantages are that it is a very mature platform. You can get great resources and help on it. 5. Think in long term for this.. to realize TCO will take a while and will need Leadership to push/weigh-in/support. 6. There will be lot of custom development (not a lot of AEM's out-of-the-box is useful). 7. Development teams can find examples, help and resources. 8. The entire stack is built on open-source, so other than paying Adobe license fees no need to pay additional software license expenses.
I hiiiighly recommend Segment. It's so incredibly fast an easy for a front-end developer to add - you can literally have it implemented in ~15 mins, and then you just tag the events you want to track, push the data to whatever tool you want.
One of the awesome things is that you can implement other tools (e.g. Intercom) through Segment with no additional coding - just add them in the Segment console. I use Mixpanel for product analytics, and Segment has flawlessly managed the data at a tiny cost.
Please don't do AEM - they're behind on features and cost more. I can't comment on Tealium but I've heard good things.
As for explaining DMP and CDP, I'd tell them that one is a generic term for how you manage your company's data broadly, and will consist of multiple ETL tools (usually this is term is used in relation to just marketing). CDP, because it's a much more narrow subset, provides specialised, simplified tooling that focuses on the way users interact with your software product. As a BI leader, I would recommend leadership start with something smaller like CDP, demonstrate success, then expand and build out your DMP over time.
