Segment integration

Overview

Segment is a customer data platform that provides a single source of truth for customer data. It consolidates data from disparate sources and makes customer data as unified objects. Segment also offers tools for cleansing and enriching data, as well as for managing customer identity.

By designating Ninetailed as a Segment destination, you can quickly use data about your customers in Ninetailed to create highly targeted Audiences.

If you want send Ninetailed Experience impressions to Segment, see our Segment SDK plugin documentation.

Installation

To set up Ninetailed to receive Segment data:

1. Open the Segment app.
2. Navigate to the Destinations catalog page and click Add Destination.
3. Search for "Ninetailed" in the Destinations Catalog, and select the "Ninetailed" destination.
4. Choose which Source should send data to the "Ninetailed" destination.
5. Go to the Ninetailed Dashboard and copy the "API key."
6. Enter the "API Key" in Segment's "Ninetailed" destination settings.

For more information, see also the Ninetailed Destination documenation maintained by Segment.

Destination data

Many types of data originating from Segment can be sent to Ninetailed profiles. These include:

• Segment track and identify calls made to a Segment Analytics.js SDK or from within an Engage Journey. These are forwarded onto Ninetailed as Ninetailed track and identify calls, typically with a delay of a few seconds.
• Engage Audiences data and computed traits information. These data are pushed to Ninetailed profiles using a Ninetailed identify call. Note however, that this syncing is done by Segment only periodically, typically on the order of a few hours.
  • Audiences are synced to Ninetailed profiles using the audience key as the trait name with a boolean value. For example, if a Segment profile is part of an Engage audience with key test_audience, the Ninetailed profile will have a trait test_audience: true.
  • Computed traits are copied over exactly to Ninetailed profile traits.

Profile synchronization

Any time Segment invokes the Ninetailed identify method to synchronize Segment trait information (as detailed above in Destination Data), it does so by using the user_id assigned to the Unify profile as the alias (when available), or the Segment assigned anonymousId. This means that in order to have Ninetailed serve experiences to that user based on Segment-populated data, you must identify the current user by this same Segment user_id or anonymousId.

Most commonly, you would identify the user after they authenticate on your site so that post-login, their Ninetailed profile is enhanced with all of the Segment traits, and belongs to all Ninetailed audiences based on those traits.

For more details, see the Ninetailed identify documentation.