Modern marketing platforms like Braze, Customer.io, Klaviyo, and others offer built-in event tracking features to power segmentation, automation, and personalization. At first glance, it seems convenient to use the same tool for both messaging and tracking. But if you’re scaling quickly or want to future-proof your data architecture, that tight coupling can hold you back.
Here are 10 reasons why decoupling your event tracking — and instead using a tool like RudderStack — can unlock greater agility, better insights, and cross-channel growth.
When event tracking lives inside your marketing automation tool, your entire engagement strategy becomes tied to that vendor’s ecosystem.
With RudderStack, you centralize event collection and can route data anywhere — marketing tools, analytics platforms, or your warehouse — with no lock-in.
With RudderStack, you instrument events once and then route them to:
This one-to-many architecture ensures consistency, reduces maintenance, and enables faster experimentation across teams.
Event forwarding from your marketing tool to ad platforms often lacks key context like IP address, user agent, or unique IDs. You’re usually limited to bulk audience syncs instead of raw, event-level data.
By collecting both client-side and server-side events directly with RudderStack and sending them to ad platforms in real time, match rates improve — driving better audience targeting and lower CAC.
Sending all events to your data warehouse opens the door to custom attribution modeling across:
RudderStack streams raw, enriched events into your warehouse, so your data team — not your marketing tool — defines attribution logic.
Product teams may use Mixpanel or Amplitude for feature tracking, while marketing teams use Braze for journeys. Why track the same events twice?
By decoupling event collection, you can:
Every tag manager, ESP, and analytics tool has quirks. Instead of defining a “Product Viewed” event three different ways, use RudderStack’s SDK once and send it everywhere.
Bonus: you can enrich events with traits like user status or location before they reach your tools.
Need to comply with GDPR, CCPA, or HIPAA? RudderStack makes it easy to:
You stay compliant without relying on downstream tools to handle sensitive data.
Want to enrich events by calling third-party APIs or transforming payloads on the fly? RudderStack supports:
Example: If a user’s Shopify ID is stored in a UTM, you can extract it with a JavaScript function, look up the user, and enrich the event with traits before sending it to Facebook Ads. This enables smarter personalization without cluttering your product codebase.
With RudderStack, your tracking plan lives in code — versioned, documented, and testable. This fosters alignment:
The result: fewer bugs, faster iterations, and greater trust in the data.
Today it might be Klaviyo. Tomorrow it could be Braze, Iterable, or a homegrown ML system. With RudderStack, switching or adding tools doesn’t require re-tracking. Just configure a new destination and your event firehose keeps flowing.
One event can be routed to:
Your marketing automation tool is great at what it does — but event tracking isn’t its core strength. Event data should be treated as a shared asset across your entire stack, not just as a trigger for email journeys.
RudderStack decouples event collection from activation, giving you flexibility, control, and the ability to grow without re-implementing every time you switch tools.
If you’re serious about data-driven growth and long-term agility, it’s time to own your events.
