Humanlytics vs Segment
Businesses today especially in eCommerce need a multichannel marketing strategy to effectively reach potential customers.
Engaging with them across multiple channels like Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Pinterest, Instagram, Blog, Email and others.
The main problem is, working with multiple channels and tools creates a lot of fragmented data that is stored in different tools, in different formats and much harder to utilize.
In this article we are looking at two tools; Segment and Humanlytics, specifically how each tool can add value to your multichannel strategy.
This is not your typical comparison post because Humanlytics and Segment are not competitors solving a similar problem.
But rather tools at different stages of the analytics workflow helping you achieve two different but equally important goals.
Segment: Make your data portable and accessible to any tool and team in your company
Humanlytics: Standardize the insight generation and action tracking process.
In the data workflow, Segment exists at the data collection stage while Humanlytics is at the data analytics stage.
Let’s start with Segment:
Segment
You can now find useful data in almost every single marketing tool.
Mailchimp has metrics on your email campaigns, Hubspot has metrics on sales performance and Zendesk or Intercom has metrics on customer support.
Your average customer will interact with dozens of tools like this, each collecting something valuable.
The problem is that all of your data is now stuck in different tools and getting it out can be a pain.
This is where Segment comes in.
To understand Segment’s value better, let’s look at the technical side of the analytics workflow.
Using these third-party tools requires integration from A/B testing tools, funnel analytics tools, churn tools, even running Facebook Ads… all require you to implement a tracking code into your website.
So when a user takes an action like “add to cart” this action is tracked by the code you implemented and sent to the third party tool say Facebook Ads.
For multiple unique events like “newsletter signup”, “login”, “product added to cart”, “product purchased”, this would be:
This is all good and well until you need to track multiple unique events for every single third party tool you integrate.
You will require different tracking codes from the tools you want to integrate to track the same user events.
In all this confusion, Segment comes in to offer a simple solution.
Where you track every event on your website once using Segment. Then Segment collects all the data from these events and sends it off to whichever third party tool you choose.
Suddenly, with one API you can share data easily with anyone in your company and more importantly with any tool and that requires it.
In the digital age, putting customers first means collecting data from all the places where a company interacts with them and routing it to the tools and business units where it is needed.
As a centralized dispatcher, Segment simplifies this process, enabling companies to collect, standardize and activate their first-party customer data without integration complexities.
Humanlytics
Humanlytics, on the other hand, is not a dispatcher but a receiver that helps you analyze your multichannel data.
Segment integrates SaaS tools like Mailchimp, Zendesk, SalesForce that generate data (users events) to ensures you track events once on your website.
Humanlytics integrates analytics tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, Shopify analytics that aggregates your data to make sure multichannel data analytics easier and more efficient.
For Humanlytics, the goal is to utilize multichannel data and help users generate actionable insights into how they can:
- Increase traffic generation to their website
- Improve conversion rates on key pages like product pages
- Increase the frequency of purchase for certain products
- Identify key customer cohorts associated with high LTV or CAC
- Reduce CAC while increasing LTV for different customer segments and so much more.
Basically using your data to show you how you can achieve your business growth targets.
Just as Segment, the need for multichannel data analytics is because of the fact that customers today use multiple platforms to engage with any given brand.
A typical customer journey involves multiple steps across different channels spanning over a couple of days, weeks or months — depending on your business model.
For eCommerce this usually looks like:
The problem here is, businesses start making decisions based on the performance of a single channel without any consideration of all the other channels involved in their customer journey.
This usually leads to wrong uninformed decision making.
For instance, just because Facebook Ads is reporting a 4.0 ROAS doesn’t mean that when you increase your Ad budget, your revenues will also increase.
As a solution, Humanlytics integrates all your analytics tools to give you a full view of your customers and how they interact with your brand across various channels.
This integration also includes key metrics’ standardization.
Metrics like CAC and LTV are much harder to calculate especially for businesses running multichannel campaigns because different platforms use different attribution models and attribution windows.
The result is usually inaccurate data about your Ad cost and conversions generated in these platforms.
A typical example is a common discrepancy in Facebook Ad conversions reported in Facebook vs. Facebook Ads conversions reported in Google Analytics.
Integrating analytics platforms and standardizing metrics across these platforms ensures that you have accurate data from which meaningful and actionable insights can be generated.
It’s at this point (when you finally have accurate multichannel data) that Humanlytics then focuses on analyzing your data.
A. I Powered Analysis
Humanlytics still focuses on the key metrics and goals you want to achieve while analyzing your data.
For example, after the integration and standardization, users are asked to set business goals and this can be as specific as:
- Grow product A sales by 20% in 3 months
- Increase “add to cart” conversions for product B by 5% in 4 weeks
- Reduce CAC for product A by 10% within one month
Based on your set goals, Humanlytics uses its A.I powered engine, DataSlinger to analyze your multichannel data and generate a set of actionable recommendations (insights) you can take to achieve the set goal.
These recommendations are based on the gap between your current performance and your desired performance.
From the analysis, Humanlytics recommends actions you can take to bridge that gap and this doesn’t stop at action recommendation.
Action tracking.
If you take the recommended actions:
Humanlytics provides a framework and dashboard you can use to monitor how effective each of the actions you take is in terms of moving you towards your goal.
This is to show you in near real-time whether you will be able to achieve your goal given the actions you have taken or not.
Human element
Taking action is something most marketing teams struggle with, even when equipped with the right insights.
Humanlytics team also schedules timely meetings to ensure that users are able to take action, track performance and achieve goals.
Conclusion:
Each of these tools presents a unique value to businesses that want to be data-driven.
- Segment makes the most sense: If your business is interested in easily integrating any tool to their website or App and making sure their data is shareable and accessible to anyone unit that needs it.
- When Humanlytics makes the most sense: If your business is interested in generating actionable insights from all it’s marketing data. Set goals and get data-backed action recommendations you can take to achieve those goals.
Analytics is supposed to provide you with the insights you need to achieve your set goals.
So as usual, keep it really simple.
Define your business goals, then choose an analytics solution that can help achieve those goals.
