Harnessing Cross-Device ID Targeting for Better Connections
Digital Marketing
Apr 05
Your brand wants to create meaningful digital campaigns to connect with its audience — but do you know who’s connecting with you and when? Are they on mobile devices, desktop computers, or tablets? If you’re not completely sure, now may be a good time to focus on incorporating cross-device ID targeting in your next campaign.
What’s XDID?
Cross-device ID technology (sometimes referred to as XDID tech) is designed to allow you to send specific, targeted advertisements to your target consumer base across a variety of platforms and devices. This is an excellent tactic for marketers because it creates more advertising channels and allows them to meet their customers at the moment they’re ready to start investing in the brand. It also lets marketers tell their brands’ stories with consistency since they can send the same message across multiple platforms and devices.
With the variety of devices available to us, it can be challenging for marketers to figure out who is interacting, their behaviors, and their browsing data when they’re using multiple devices and access points. Cross-device ID tech aims to eliminate the problem and identify the customer’s identity regardless of where they’re coming from, such as if User A uses an iPad and smartphone while User B connects through their smart TV and Alexa.
Why XDID Is Better Than Cookies
Cross-device ID technology is replacing HTTP cookies for one main reason: HTTP cookies were never designed to track users across multiple devices. Cookie synchronization occurs only in one place at a time.
Think about how you use your computer. Your browser’s cookies are synched up with what you viewed while you using that browser, but if you use two different browsers — such as Chrome and Safari, for example — their cookie data will not be shared. With each and every URL you open, you generate new cookies. Doing this from system to system creates a confusing mishmash of data for marketers to try to collect and analyze.
Cross-device ID tech helps reduce confusion by more effectively tracking the user by device or group of devices. By accurately identifying them, it’s easier to build a profile for that particular digital customer. Then, once the person’s identity is established and you gather insights about how they’re interacting with your brand, you can start sending personalized, targeted content their way.
Mastering Cross-Device ID Solutions
Mastering cross-device ID targeting and tracking starts with collecting appropriate customer data. There are a few data points that will help you narrow down who’s interacting with your brand. Those pieces of data may include:
-Location data, like addresses from social check-ins
-Mobile app data and any associated attribution from the user
-Cookies, IP addresses, pixel tags, and other digital data
-Personal identifiers, like the person’s name, email address, social media username/handle, or other authentic first-party data
There are some platforms that can be used to help collect and analyze this information. Some of them include:
-The Oracle Data Cloud Platform
-The Salesforce Data Management Platform
-The OneView Identity and Data Management Platform
The goal of using any of these platforms is to accurately identify who is using certain devices and then link them with the digital interactions you’re seeing with your brand. Each platform may have slightly different aims. For example, the Roku OneView platform is more specifically aimed at television audiences who stream from multiple devices on Roku, whereas Salesforce has cross-device tracking that is more general, collecting data from the Salesforce API.
How To Make Cross-Device Data Work for You
Once you know where your audience is coming from and which devices they’re using, you can focus your efforts on creating marketing strategies for those devices.
For example, Shutterfly, an online print-on-demand service, decided to turn to a multi-screen approach for its marketing campaigns. By understanding that many of the customers started out on mobile but ended up using their desktops to complete the purchasing process, Shutterfly was able to increase its mobile conversions by 60 times and its desktop conversions by 19 times. The company went on to increase its mobile spending, which led to it having 115 times more conversions year-over-year.
Cross-device targeting allows you to extend your marketing campaigns’ reach, letting your brand communicate with your clients on the devices they use most. It’s worth looking at the top devices used, so you can adapt your marketing targets appropriately.
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