Account
A segregated account within your Intilery instance with nothing shared between accounts.
API
Application Programming Interface. In software, this term describes a way of interacting with software in an automated fashion, without the use of a user-interface designed for humans. In Segment, we call the standard calls (track
, page
and screen
, identify
and group
) our API. We also provide the Config API, which you can use to configure sources and destinations, and perform other functions in your workspace, without logging in using a web browser.
App
The app is what we call the main Segment web application, the part you log in to, and where you configure sources and destinations, see events in the debugger, manage your tracking plan, and so on.
Asset
A set of customers based on static or dynamic rules
Asynchronous
Asynchronous means occurring without a specific order or sequence. In engineering, it’s most often used for things like when you have to ask a server for a piece of information. If that was a synchronous task, while you were waiting for the server to respond you wouldn’t be able to do anything else, you’d just be stuck waiting. But since it’s asynchronous, you can request information from a server, continue to go do a bunch of other tasks, and then when the server responds you can get back to what you were doing to start. Basically it lets you work on multiple things at once (in parallel) instead of needing to finish everything in the order it comes in. Think of it like one of the ways computers are able to multi-task.
Audience
Audience allow you to define cohorts of users or accounts based on their event behaviour and traits that Segment then keeps up-to-date over time. Think of it as a message being sent to a channel i.e. email. Audiences can be built from your core tracking events, traits, or computed traits. These audiences can then be synced to hundreds of destinations or available using the Profile API.
AWS
Amazon Web Services, a large cloud service provider.
CDN
Content Delivery Network. CDNs are a network of servers which make downloading files faster for the user, by placing them all around the world to reduce data transit time. When you have servers in a CDN, they’re much closer on average to the end user. If someone is using Segment in Asia, they don’t have to download our files all the way from California, they can get them from a server much closer to them in the network.
CDP
Customer Data Platform: a central platform that brokers the flow of customer data through their application infrastructure so that they can build a central understanding of each customer’s interactions, comply with regulations that require them to carefully manage customer data, and ensure that their interactions with the customer are optimized.
Cookies
Cookies are small pieces of text that are stored by the browser on a website. Cookies have a name and a value. They may also be set from Javascript using document.cookie
. Our analytics.js script sets up a cookie called ajs_uid
to store the user’s id.
Every time you make a request to a website, you send along the cookies that you have stored. It’s how the website figures out who you should be logged in as. You can think of it sort of like a passport as a form of ID. When you first enter your username and password, the website generates a secure cookie, and tells your browser to store it. From then on, your browser sends along the cookie as a way of identifying yourself to the website.
Computed Trait
Computed traits are per-user, or per-account traits that you create or “compute” in Personas. When you build a Computed Trait, Personas adds it to relevant user profiles.
A computed trait is a trait of a customer that is not set directly, is is defined by a computation.
The trait can be accessed by any part of the system and should be displayed in the customer ui
The setup of the computed traits is done in that section and is a “technical task” by nature, and likely not done by the marketeer
i.e Customer.lastQuote
This is a computed trait that makes the properties of the last quote event (for that customer) to be accessed by the customer.lastQuote trait
Custom Trait
Custom Traits are user or account properties collected from all the events you send to Personas. For example, you can add any properties that you send as a part of your track calls or identify calls (email
, first_name
, last_name
) as custom traits. You can then view them in the profile explorer, and use them in your audiences, computed traits and SQL traits.
DMP
Data management platform
DSP
Demand-side platform
Dynamic Content
Reusable content blocks you build
ETL
Extract, Transform and Load. Referring to the process of extracting data from a production system, transforming it with enriching data into a new format, and then loading it into a data warehouse for analysis (a separate database from production).
Event
An event can refer to either an action by a user, or something a user does which triggers a track call. Events have a name (for example “Product viewed”) and properties (for example the product name, price, and category), and take place in a single moment in time. (This is in contrast to “objects” which persist over a period of time, and which have properties that might change.)
Identify
a call that gathers information about who the user is.
Journey
A one-to-one flow of activities for an individual customer
JSON
JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, is a convenient format for storing structured data.
Library
A library is a reusable piece of code which acts as a building block for higher level pieces of code. It’s the software equivalent of a ‘tool’. For instance, take Instagram filters. In the good old days, to take a picture with an interesting filter, you had to adjust the aperture length, the focal length, the exposure and film speed to get the desired effect. But now, you can just use Instagram, and press a button to get the pre-tuned filter that you want. They’ve packaged those effects in software and made them re-usable.
The most common use case for this term at Segment is in reference to the libraries people use to send data to our API. A full list of libraries can be found in our docs.
Method
A method is programming speak for “an action an object can take”. It’s a specific type of function that is attached to an object. All of our analytics tracking libraries create analytics
objects, and then track
, identify
, page
, etc are methods you can invoke on those objects.
MTU
Monthly Tracked Users. They are calculated by adding the number unique userIds and number of unique anonymousIds that a customer tracks with Segment.
OTT (Over the Top)
Over the top (OTT) refers to content providers that distribute streaming media as a standalone product directly to viewers over the Internet, bypassing telecommunications, multichannel television, and broadcast television platforms that traditionally act as a controller or distributor of such content.
Page
The Segment API call records that a user “viewed a page”. It’s recorded by calling analytics.page()
. You can optionally pass in a name
and a category
.
Postgres
An open-source SQL server
Redshift
An analytics data warehouse from Amazon Web Services. Made for loading in tons of event data, and then analysing it with complex queries. It’s designed to be fast and cheap.
Regulations
GDPR items, stop tracking etc.
Retry
How often we attempt to redeliver a payload before marking it as failed.
Replay
The ability to re-send your user data to new destinations and tools.
Row
A row of columns in a email (landing pages and popups (coming soon))
Row Condition
The rule to display/hide a row
Saved Row
A row of content you can drag on to email (landing pages and Popups (coming soon)
Schedule
The act of sending an asset on a time/date to an audience
Schema
A schema is a word used to refer to the design of a database, including what fields there are, and what data types each one contains. The events and their properties that you send to Intilery you were to think of a database as a spreadsheet, the schema would be the top row with the field labels, plus the data types and formatting rules for each column.
In Segment, you can send data to a Warehouse which has a schema based on the types of data you collect and route through Segment, and which updates as the data you collect changes.
Segment Manager
Rather than “firing and forgetting,” Segment takes a data-centric, deliberate approach to destinations. We collect your data, and understand what it means so we can map it to each destination correctly. You don’t need to set up special parameters for each tool – we do that for you. Segment works because all of these tools operate on the same customer data: who is on your app and what are they doing. Segment collects this data once, then translates and sends it to every tool you use. Because we store the data, we also have the ability to replay your historical data into new tools and give you access to your raw data in a SQL data warehouse.
SDK
Software Development Kit. This is a combination of libraries and used mostly in the context of building mobile or native apps.
SQL
(pronounced ‘sequel’) Structured Query Language. The standard language for retrieving information from a database. It’s often called “relational” because all the queries are related to relations between the data. For instance, find me all users who are named “Alice” would translate to…
select * from users where first_name equals "Alice"
SQL Traits
SQL traits are per-user or per-account traits that you create by running queries against your data warehouse, which can include data not captured using your Segment implementation. Segment imports the results into Personas, and appends these traits to the user profile.
Source
A website, server library, mobile SDK, or cloud application which can send data into Segment.
Spec
Short for “Specification”, the Segment Spec is our set of recommendations for what data to collect, and how to format it, for best
Tag Manager
Tag managers, also known as Tag Management Systems (TMS), were a popular solution before the mainstream adoption of mobile apps. They primarily helped Digital Analytics and Online Marketers manage web tags or “beacons” on a website.
Built on an older technology, tag managers inject either a piece of JavaScript or an ad pixel into a website. They carry out rules marketers create for each tag, like firing an ad channel pixel when that network refers a website visitor. Every tag requires users to create rules. No data is stored, and no code is eliminated.
Test Customers
Template
Throughput
The number of API calls and Objects your account makes, per MTU. The limit on this number is defined by your account plan.
Track
Type of API call (method) which records any actions that users perform on a web or mobile app.
Tracking Plan
A tracking plan is a tool that our customers use to keep track of their analytics setup. It contains all of the events, pages, traits and properties they want to record with information about how each is laid out. It’s often in a spreadsheet or document, but we’re actually building the functionality into the core product so that people can plan out their tracking setup right from inside Segment.
Traits
Traits are individual pieces of information that we know about an object. Objects persist over time, so traits can change over time.
Users
Versioning
Warehouses
Segment’s Data warehouse product. All event data can be sent to one of several Warehouses, where your team can use it to perform more complex analysis of the data.