The Power of Cross-Device Tracking for Brands & Advertisers 

The advertisement business is a close-knit system – a user sees an ad on his smart TV and then explores the product on his smartphone, only to complete his purchase on his laptop. We’ve factored in 3 devices for a single conversion in the above example. Cross-device tracking is more important than ever in the performance marketing landscape. Consider a customer who sees a product ad while commuting to work but purchases it later using his laptop. If the brand or the advertiser has a platform that supports cross-device tracking, they can track the conversion that traversed the smartphone to the computer. Without this system, the brand/advertiser might attribute the conversion to a desktop, while the smartphone also plays a pivotal role in driving the customer towards a sale.

Hence, cross-device tracking is indispensable for every brand and advertiser in performance marketing.

What is Cross Device Tracking?

Cross-device tracking is a strategy businesses implement that allows them to track customer behaviour online and helps establish a correlation between customer behaviour across different devices.

This allows brands and businesses to understand better and clearly understand how the customer views their product in the real world and how they use their apps and mobile devices. This is essential for the brands to offer the customers an enhanced journey and boost their online conversion rates.

Faizan Ayubi, CEO & Co-Founder at Trackier, emphasizes the complexity of customer journeys in the current landscape: “Modern customer journeys are far from linear. Today’s average customer navigates through multiple layers and across various devices before reaching the final checkout page. Merely attributing conversions to a single source without considering the devices that shaped the entire journey is insufficient. To achieve a comprehensive understanding, it’s crucial to ensure that your attribution tracking platform effectively captures user interactions across diverse touchpoints.”

Marketers must utilize this cross-device tracking information on their e-commerce websites to make the most out of this. They are integrating the right partner, such as Trackier, that can offer you detailed information leveraging its advanced technology platform. This information can be leveraged to deliver personalized ads to the target customers across multiple devices and allow the users to engage with the ads.

Why is Cross-Device Tracking Important?

Without cross-device tracking, it would be difficult for the brands to track customer behaviour and predict outcomes. It would also be difficult to predict or complete a picture of user interaction with your products and services across all their devices.

Here are some more benefits of using cross-device tracking by brands. 

• Holistic Customer Journey: In today’s multi-device world, customers often switch between devices before purchasing. Cross-device tracking allows marketers to understand the customer journey, ensuring a seamless, personalized experience across devices. It will further enable marketers to understand device usage for ad targeting and better understand customer data.
• Attribution Accuracy: Without cross-device tracking, there’s a risk of attributing conversions to the wrong source. This tracking method helps accurately attribute conversions to the correct touchpoints, providing a more realistic view of campaign performance.
• Optimized Ad Targeting: With insights into users’ cross-device behaviour, marketers can maximize ad targeting strategies. For example, ads can be tailored accordingly if a user frequently researches products on a mobile device but purchases on a desktop.
• Enhanced Retargeting: Cross-device tracking enables more effective retargeting campaigns. If a user views a product on a mobile app and later switches to a desktop, retargeting ads can be delivered on the desktop, reminding them of their initial interest.

How Does It Work?

Here is the detailed procedure of how cross-device tracking works: 

• User Identification: A unique identifier is assigned to the user, often through login credentials or device identifiers. This identifier is used to track the same user across multiple devices.
• Behaviour Tracking: When the user interacts with the ad or website through one device, tracking signals like cookies, device IDs, or fingerprinting record this interaction and store information about the user’s behaviour, preferences, and actions.
• Deterministic Matching: Using Personally Identifiable Information (PII), the attribution tracking platform attributes the conversion over multiple devices.
• Probabilistic Matching: Using algorithms and machine learning to detect statistical patterns, the attribution tracking platform identifies the same user across multiple devices and matches them accordingly.
• Algorithmic Modeling: Some bigshot platforms like Meta build their algorithms based on large data sets of cross-device user behaviour. Such models have high match rates and successfully detect complex patterns, which are impossible to track with probabilistic models.

Concluding Thoughts

Cross-device tracking is turning out to be one of the most beneficial strategies that marketers can implement to get accurate data on their customer behaviour and predict customer patterns based on the collected data.

Integrating the right partner like Trackier can further allow the brands to focus on offering personalized and targeted ads for a specific audience and save money and other resources. It is one of the biggest trends helping small businesses scale and earn more profit with less investment.

Therefore, while choosing an attribution tracking partner for your performance marketing and mobile marketing campaigns, consider a solution or platform that provides accurate cross-device tracking and empowers your brands to deliver personalized and targeted ads to specific audiences with a dedicated customer success mechanism.