Why Cross-Device Attribution is Critical for Multichannel Marketing

Why Cross-Device Attribution is Critical for Multichannel Marketing

How do you measure the effectiveness of multichannel campaigns?

Well, you need to have a view of all consumer engagements with your campaign content. That helps you understand how creative is performing across display, mobile, social, email and other media — and how consumers are interacting with your content.

To gain this understanding, you need to know which devices belong to which consumers. Every engagement requires a device (e.g. desktop browser, mobile app), and today most consumers use several devices on a path to conversion. That means they are jumping between channels and contexts as they interact with your campaign content.

Following these consumer journeys is the key to unlocking deeper insights into campaign performance, but you need cross-device technology to identify which devices belong to whom. This information enables marketers to build attribution models, analytics and other campaign reporting streams that are precise down to the device level, painting the full picture of a user’s journey.

Based on our experience working with leading brands and agencies across the globe, we’ve learned a few things about the impact of cross-device attribution and how it relates to multichannel marketing. Here’s what you should know:

1. It connects an increasingly fragmented audience.

The average consumer owns 3.64 connected devices, and the average household owns 7.2. While marketers can see all these devices, they don’t know which ones belong to the same user, giving them a fragmented view of consumer journeys. As consumers adopt more and more devices, marketers need a unified view of how they are interacting with brand content.

This is especially true for influencers and partners. In order to measure how much traffic influencers are driving, you need to know which devices belong to each influencer. That way you can track influencer touch points across channels to make sure you are including those engagements — and the traffic they generate — in your influencer reporting metrics.

2. Cross-device attribution brings more meaning to conversions.

Cross-device enables you to attribute all touch points (across channels and contexts) to a given user, giving you a richer view of that consumer’s path to conversion.

With more comprehensive user-level data, marketers can gain a deeper understanding of which content is working, and on which channels and devices. Sometimes consumers browse on one device, compare prices on another, and convert on a third.

Without cross-screen technology to power multi-touch attribution, there is no way for the marketer to tie the conversion to the true media exposure.

How do we know this?

Typically we only see 65% of users seeing an ad and converting on the same device or session, which means that 35% of conversions are not being attributed to the correct channel.

We have also found that consumers who are exposed to ads on multiple devices are 5x more likely to convert than those who only see ads on one device. Without cross-device visibility, it’s almost impossible for the marketer to attribute conversion credit accurately.

3. It solves for the declining reliability of traditional performance metrics.

Without a complete view of your audience across devices, it may be unclear how to optimize targeting and other attributes on future campaigns. Traditional metrics such as CTR, VCR and CPA provide useful information on media performance, but not enough to evaluate budget allocation or overall investments — especially when considering how many consumers use multiple devices.

Marketers need a way to measure whether time spent with the brand drives awareness, satisfaction and purchases, and which devices contribute positively to those KPIs.

That is why we empower our customers to leverage new metrics, such as Viewable Exposure Time™ (VET), which lets an advertiser know exactly how long a consumer viewed a video ad.

By tracking this metric across devices, multi-channel marketers can understand how users are interacting with creative on each device, and which devices are generating the most resonant engagements. So far we’re seeing a 60% uptick in conversion rates by adding VET across all devices rather than relying solely on reach and frequency.

The customer journey spans apps, devices and channels. That means your campaign measurement tools need to do the same.

If you want to understand how multi-channel campaigns are performing, you need to be able to identify which devices belong to whom so you can engage consumers in the right place, at the right time — and achieve measurable results.