mParticle: a Customer Data Platform that never stops innovating
We’ve talked about Segment and Tealium in our recent posts on how both focus on different target segments and components in the Customer Data Platform (CDP) space. Today’s article will be touching on where mParticle fits in the room. Segment and mParticle were born around the same year when the “Customer Data Platform” concept emerged not long after Tealium made the switch. Some people say that Segment and mParticle are nemeses. But, we see that mParticle is much more competitive for Tealium vs. Segment because the products are enterprise-grade and mParticle never stops innovating to improve its products. Similar to Tealium, mParticle also provides solutions for large Enterprises vs. mid-market. mParticle is moderately well-known, used by famous brand names such as Venmo, Spotify, Airbnb, and many more. For a solution that has big brand names supporting them, mParticle is reasonably affordable. Unlike Tealium, mParticle concentrates on data infrastructure and enforces data quality and governance. They let marketers build fully managed, highly available, and secure data infrastructure. mParticle’s Data Connections lets you capture data from all of your platforms and data sources using 12 platform-specific SDKs or Events API and connect to (and from) 300+ marketing tools. Their newly released feature lets you measure video and audio usage metrics and more with one easy-to-setup SDK. They support teams across your organization with always-on Data Quality tools, such as creating a pipeline of consistently clean, accessible data for all stakeholders or merging anonymous and known customer profiles programmatically while maintaining compliance. Their “Smartype” feature also enables engineers to ensure proper event collection at run time with automatic code completion to eliminate incorrect cross-platform instrumentations. Their Data Governance safeguards your customer’s privacy by working with OneTrust to collect and manage compliance and consent across your stack. They meet compliance regulations wherever your company has a presence across the world. They also honor requests from Apple users to opt out of data collection for analytics tracking. Lastly, mParticle lets you extend 275+ event and audience integrations to include 550+ LiveRamp-powered integrations with leading measurement and media partners. Their “Calculated Attributes” feature will continuously update user and event attribute calculations for deeper customer insights that you can use to enrich audiences, drive increased personalization, enhance analytics, and improve speed to market. Segment also highlights their Data Connections/Infrastructure, and Tealium is designed for Enterprise. However, we like mParticle as they are genuinely enterprise-grade and have a well-planned product strategy and wide-ranging roadmap. If you wish to understand more about mParticle and how they can fit in your stack as your data layer, contact Ematic’s buyers’ agent today.
Segment: A simple yet powerful data unification solution for your growth stack
For marketers looking to build a modern, best-of-breed growth stack, Ematic highly recommends looking at Segment as a starting point. While “CDP” or Customer Data Platform has practically become a buzzword recently, the essential need isn’t the actual data platform. It’s simply the data integration and data unification layer that is the foundation of today’s growth stacks. CDP serves as a single source of truth of your data that enables you to leverage them in real-time for marketing purposes. While the concept is simple, CDP consists of a few components: Some CDP solutions like Segment offers these three components individually. With Segment’s “Data Connections” product, the dream of using the best tools and leveraging a unified data set across the entire digital ecosystem becomes possible. It is not only an affordable solution, but it can potentially reduce costs overall and fundamentally reduce a fair amount of manual work for your IT team to collect and connect customer data from multiple data sources (e.g., GA/FB pixel/Intercom) using Segment’s unified tracking code. Once you’ve set up Segment’s “Connections” product, adding or changing components of your growth stack goes from “complex and expensive” to “plug and play” which means whether you’re leveraging 3rd parties or your own team to perform the setup, your costs go down dramatically. If you’re looking at Mixpanel, Amplitude, Iterable, Braze, Adjust, Appsflyer, or other best of breed marketing technology, integrating Segment first allows you to rapidly develop the entire stack and get your time to value down to an absolute minimum. We still very much like Tealium as a more full-featured CDP play, but for marketers who aren’t quite ready for that level, consider Segment as an excellent utility play that can completely change the trajectory of your growth stack both now and into the future. If you are interested in understanding more about Segment, Ematic can help organize a demo and provide consultation. Talk to our buyer’s agent and get yourself a demo!