Cross platform tracking

Cross-platform tracking or measurement refers to measuring marketing success across channels. For example, a customer might start on the web and finish on an app. Or people might see your products on your app and want to view them on a larger screen before purchasing.

Whatever the direction, cross-platform tracking helps you understand the user journey and the customer journey, which enables you to optimize your app, website, and support services to make that flow easier.

Similar to cross-device attribution, one of the main use cases for cross-platform tracking is for advertisers to have an accurate view of their ad performance and ROI. Using traditional attribution tools or the attribution provided by an ad network, you won’t be able to see the complete customer journey that eventually led to the conversion. As a result, this may overestimate or underestimate the performance of each campaign or ad network. 

In the context of advertising, BigCommerce highlights one of the main benefits of cross-platform tracking as follows:

Cross-device tracking also saves companies money in the long run. Advertising optimization on a per-device basis sheds light onto which messages are working in each given channel. Targeted advertising leads to higher conversion rates.

Aside from tracking attribution across devices and ad networks, cross-platform tracking allows marketers to better understand their user journey. For example, if the business has both a desktop and mobile app, they may want to measure where the majority of purchases are coming from. Ultimately, having a more holistic view of how users interact with each platform allows marketers to optimize their apps for the device or platform in question.

Singular has put a lot of effort into ensuring that marketers can use the Singular platform to measure marketing effectiveness and customer journeys wherever that takes your users.

Interestingly, while in iOS 14 Apple is essentially deprecating the IDFA, in web-to-app mobile measurement the web page and the mobile app belong to the same advertiser, and tying in-app events to UTM parameters is allowed. This makes web-to-app cross-platform tracking or measurement highly attractive for marketers whose products are suitable for mobile web and web-based landing pages. As highlighted in our guide to IDFA deprecation regarding the SKAdNetwork:

There’s actually some real power to this solution, especially if you use Singular SKAN to maximize the predictability of your marketing attribution data. And it’s available for all users, eliminating the Limit Ad Tracking (LAT) blindspot.

In order to improve cross-platform tracking for app business, Singular provides several core features, including:

• The ability to measure and report on all the channels you work with using our open integration framework, including apps, web, SMS, referrals, email, and TV
• Analyzing the ROI of marketing efforts by combining cross-platform attribution with cost aggregation
• Tracking and analyzing user behavior across the entire user lifecycle, including reporting on acquisition and re-engagement campaigns across platforms with deep links, web-to-app, and cross-device attribution

By combining these tracking and attribution tools, marketers are able to better understand which marketing activities are leading to app installs, and what their users are doing on each platform after their initial conversion. With this data readily accessible, marketers know which platforms and devices need to be optimized, including support services, re-engagement campaigns, and more.