so much to do in mobile - cross device tracking & measurement - part 5
How many tracking tags does your site have? On one site I found 70.
What do all these tags do? In my opinion, they fulfill mainly three functions.
1) Web analytics. Funnel, page flow, traffic source.
2) Cross-channel marketing attribution. Either single touch or multi touch.
3) Optimization. DMP, DSP.
Optimization, especially real-time optimization, is the main driver for multiple tagging. Optimizers prefer collecting the data directly from the site, rather than depending on another third party data provider.
The sheer number of tags and the lack of data control gave birth to a new type of data service - tag management system. Tag management tools are designed to satisfy all three functions. In doing so, they risk becoming too complicated themselves. Major players in this space all offer their own packages. Many smaller players provide niche solutions.
Same tracking functions are needed for mobile apps. However, mobile app has much smaller real estate, therefore presents some unique challenges.
- Mobile advertising is segmented. Some companies wall off competition by not recognizing third party tracking. This does not result in the intended monopoly of marketing dollars. Most companies still buy from multiple publishers and ad networks. And multiple sdks get added to the app. Everyone recognize not de-duping among traffic sources is an issue, which leads to duplicate payout. A number of companies arise to address this challenge by being the mobile attribution engine. The key to their success is the acceptance by dominant publishers, namely, Facebook and Google.
- There is yet a sdk management tool for apps like the tag management tool for website. Few sdks are truly server side codes. The ever changing mobile landscape forces companies to keep on updating sdks. All add to the burden of app developers. Since app updates never capture the whole user population, we will always have "residual" data from the older version.
- Cross-device tracking is evolving but yet a reliable operation tool. Google published studies on cross-device usage to demonstrate their mobile AdWords effectiveness. In these studies Google may use their own log-ins to link users across devices. However, when they offer cross-device analytics product, they rely on the client's user IDs. The difference is Google's coverage is substantially larger than the client's. Facebook recently announced a cross-device tracking and advertising product. I'll be waiting to see how they tackle the problem. Mostly likely Facebook will limit such insight within their network. Another cross-device marketing provider Drawbridge is brilliant in finger printing, but cannot share such insight at the user level, which makes the intelligence unusable to a company's other marketing programs. By consolidating data across devices we were able to make progress in building a cross-device user profile. Now we are investigating ways to push such insight out to the campaign level in real time.







