Segment Integration

Segment allows you to easily manage data and integrations with services across your Growth, Product, and Marketing stack. By tracking events and users via Segment’s API and libraries, you can send your product’s data to all of your analytics/marketing platforms, with minimal instrumentation code. They offer support for most platforms, including iOS, Android, JavaScript, Node.js, PHP, and more.

Simple Segment setup (minimal feature support)

The standard Segment analytics supports simple tracking of pageviews, custom events and identifying users.

Make sure you have a Segment account and a PostHog account, either self-hosted or using PostHog Cloud.

1. In the Segment workspace, create a new project and enable PostHog as an integration. We are listed as a 'Destination' on Segment.
2. Grab the PostHog API key from the 'Project Settings' page in PostHog.
3. Use one of Segment's libraries to send events.
4. See the events coming into PostHog

Full Segment setup (all features supported)

As Segment does not load any of our custom Javascript, it has limitations and by default cannot support other features of PostHog such as autocapture, session recording, feature flags, heatmaps or the toolbar. Segment is also more easily blocked by ad-blockers.

If you would like these additional features, as well as any other functions of our JS library, you can follow the instructions below to continue using Segment analytics but with additional PostHog functionality.

1. In addition to Segment, install your PostHog JS snippet
2. Modify the initialization as documented below to pass the segment analytics through for PostHog JS to sync with:

var analytics = "<Segment analytics snippet code>"; 
analytics.load("<your-segment-key>");

analytics.ready(() => {
    posthog.init("<your-posthog-key>", {
        // Pass window.analytics here - NOTE: `window.` is important
        segment: window.analytics,
        // You want this false if you are going to use segment's `analytics.page()` for pageviews
        capture_pageview: false, 
    });
    // Make sure to send the first pageview _after_ posthog is initialised to get all the correct properties linked
    window.analytics.page();
})