so much to do in mobile - cross device tracking & measurement - part 1
How do you analyze four websites, four mobile phone websites, four tablet websites, and ten apps all together, to find out how your customers are interacting with all or a subset of these products?
How do you then use the data to decide how to market these products, individually or together? What marketing works the best for the product independently or combined? And how spending on one product may have ripple effect on others?
For the companies who started on the web, seeing increasingly traffic coming from the mobile devices, and rushed to build mobile products, these are our challenges.
Customers are oblivious to the technical challenges we face, and expect a coherent experience across all devices. One example of such challenge is a common cart. A customer who placed items in her web cart expects to see the items in the cart when she logs into the mobile app. If she started a custom item on the web, she expects to continue the customization on the mobile devices. Not providing such coherent experience is like splitting her kitchen into many different ones. Each kitchen is well equipped but with different functions. In one kitchen she can only bake, in another she can only stew, in the third she can bake and stir fry but not stew...To make a dinner she needs to remember there is bread baking in number 1, stew in number 2 (or maybe number 3?), and stir fly in number 3. To "help" her to remember, the kitchens start to send her updates. She receives ten messages from each kitchen and quickly loses track.
How do we, the data providers and analysts, build one kitchen for her, and hide all the complexities from the public view?