Cross device targeting is the process of identifying and delivering ads to a particular user across all devices – Mobile Phones, Tablets, Personal Computers and Smart TVs. Cross Device Targeting is more efficient than other targeting methods.
As per the latest survey, an average consumer uses 4.1 devices each day. The mobile device is listed on top as expected. Most consumers search for their needs on their mobile phones and end the purchase on their computers. For example, User A planned to go to Singapore and often search for flight price details on his mobile phone for a week. The same person uses his laptop at home and finally, he is decided to book the ticket. If he sees any flight discount advertisements or hotel room offers advertisement on his computer then he should click it and book the ticket or hotel room [it leads to an action]. That is why the cross device targeting is more efficient than other targeting methods.
What Is Cross Device Targeting?
Cross device targeting is the process of identifying and delivering ads to a particular user across the device – Mobile Phone, Tablet, Personal Computer, and Smart TV. In digital marketing, two major problems are there,
>> Finding Right Customer
>> Satisfy them to make an action
People do search most of the time on their mobile phones and end the purchase with their PC, such as booking, purchase, etc. Today most advertisers believe that if we show the personalized sequential advertisements to consumers across the device they end with action.
So, it is important to identify the users across multiple digital devices. Here the technology comes Cross-Device Targeting/Marketing.
How Does Cross Device Targeting Work?
One of the major data point collecting company “Tapad” said that the cross-device targeting enable the below important features,
1. Reaching the right people, on the right device with the right brand message (accuracy)
2. Connecting with enough people to positively impact the brand (scale)
There are two methods used to identify the consumers across the device,
>> Deterministic Data Approach
>> Probabilistic Data Approach
Deterministic Data Approach
Identifiable data – such as email, sign-in, and mailing address are used to identify the person. For example,
User A login to Facebook on his Samsung Mobile phone and later same email address was used to log in Facebook on a personal computer. Here we can easily understand that the same person who accesses the Samsung mobile phone is using a personal computer.
User A signs in on the youtube app on his mobile phone, pc, tablet, and Smart Tv using the same gmail address. Here we can understand that the same person uses all the above devices.
Email, sign-in, and mailing address is called first-party data. This method doesn’t want any complicated work and it gives strong identification too. But note that this first-party data belongs to particular big tech giants [Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, etc]. If any marketers do not want to tie up with these big tech giants means – another approach comes in place, Probabilistic Data Approach.
Note: We can’t tell Deterministic Data Approach is 100% efficient. If anyone uses a friend’s email address to log in, at that time system wrongly identifies the user.
Probabilistic Data Approach
Non Identifiable data – Such as browsing details, device proximity, cookies,IP address, etc are matched together to identify the user. For example, every time we browse on the internet we leave our internet foot identification without knowing ourselves. This is enough data to identify you when you are accessing the internet using a new device. But lots of matching processes need to be done by the data providers to identify the users. When testing this method, it accurately matches the users across multiple devices successfully at the rate 97.3%.
Advantages of Cross Device Targeting
- Advertisers can show a series of advertisements to the same user across the different devices.
- Control Frequency of showing the same advertisement to the same user across different devices
- Easily connect with more people.
- Better understanding of the consumer – how their behavior changes across devices.
- User experience is good. Users can see advertisements related to their searches.
Conclusion
Cross Device Targeting enables to you target a single person across multiple devices. Also, you can follow them with the correct advertising messages to convert. Finally, you can apply features like frequency caps more effectively across all devices and can display ads without disturbing the user.
