Alex Grach is the Head of Sales EMEA who is dreaming of a holiday while working on his laptop. His presentation discusses the importance of mobile-first businesses and personalized messaging through people-based attribution. It shows how people can be tracked across devices and platforms to better understand user behavior, optimize ad spend, and improve the user experience through personalized ads and messaging. The presentation promotes using a single SDK for people-based attribution to gain insights into organic user behavior and audiences that may be larger than estimated.
9. Non-m obile fi rst businesses expanding into m obile
Global sm artphone penetration 2017 - 2021
% PopulationUsers / Billions Key
10. Alexspendshisdayat work onhis
laptopdreaming of a holiday…Hisboss
thinkshe’sworking.
Later thatweek, AlexsurfsFacebook
andseesan adforthe hotelhe looked
at.
Twoweekslater,Alexseesa limited
time offer forthehotelanddownloads
the appwith a deeplinkstraightto the
hotel.
Thenext day, Alexgets approvalfrom
hisbossand booksonhis laptop.
On my walk into work everyday in Tel Aviv, I used to go to the same coffee shop every day.
It’s a part of my daily routine that I love and I imagine many of you have a similar ritual related to your first caffeine hit each day.
Now, every day when I go into the cafe, I’m greeted by a familiar smiling face and they immediately reach for my own personal mug.
They know exactly how I like my coffee and I don’t need to do anything other than say hi and have a chat to them about the weather.
It’s not just the coffee that’s great, but also the very personal experience I get from the barista.
It’s a simple story about using first party data in a non-controversial way to make my everyday coffee even more enjoyable and in doing so they increase my loyalty to their brand and the frequency with which I engage with them.
But this only works because it’s one coffee shop.
If I was visiting multiple shops and interacting with them digitally, this experience would become significantly more challenging.
And this is the challenge that marketers face every day when trying to understand the buying journeys that their customers go on, often spanning multiple different devices over long time periods.
Attribution is about ultimately about understanding the relationship between different customer actions. It’s about the totality of touchpoints across the entire user journey.
Understanding these user journeys is complex enough as it is, but it becomes a whole lot more complex when we think about the number of different devices that are available to the end user.
eMarketer forecasts that by 2020, there will be 24 billion connected devices globally. That’s four devices for every single human on the planet. Next year!
Now obviously, today, we’re not worried about trying to get an end user to download a game or book a holiday using their fridge. This 24 billion includes connected cars, fridges and many other internet of things enabled devices.
But what we do know today is that, even without the internet of things, between smartphones, tablets, apps, mobile and desktop web, marketers already have a real challenge understanding and managing cross device user experiences.
But getting to grips with this complex discipline now is a necessity, because it’s not going away.
But don’t worry friends, you’re not alone!
The reality is that businesses have struggled with this for many years and continue to do so.
We call it People Based Attribution, but it’s been called many things over the years, including Holistic Marketing, Single Customer View, 360 Marketing and many other names.
Like many buzzwords though, there’s often lots of hype, but that doesn’t mean that everyone knows what they’re talking about.
In fact, according to eMarketer, as few as 3% of US businesses surveyed in 2019 claimed they offer true omnichannel personalisation.
This isn’t surprising, but we believe that we can change that, and help marketers like you to greatly increase your understanding and visibility of your customers’ journeys and interactions with your brands.
The benefits of doing so, as I will explain later, are significant.
But first, let’s ask why this is even important.
Whether your business is mobile first, mobile only, desktop only or maybe even completely offline doesn’t really matter.
What matters is that consumers are cross-platform and platform agnostic.
Web, mobile, offline are all converging and the consumer expects to be able to interact with your business whenever, wherever and on whatever platform they choose.
Convergence, as well as the proliferation of internet connected technologies, is what is driving ever changing consumer behaviours and the subsequent need for digital transformation in almost every business.
Businesses that used to be mobile first or mobile only are now launching desktop services as desktop internet usage is not slowing down at all.
Many predicted it would, but the reality is that it remains high and this presents both an opportunity and a challenge to mobile developers.
If we look at ride hailing services as an example, many big ride hailing apps are now using desktop as their primary recruitment channel for new drivers. It’s often more cost effective than mobile, lends itself well to the signup process and using technology like OneLink, our deep linking solution, it’s super easy to convert web registrations to mobile app downloads.
Likewise, there’s also increasing interest in mobile from non-mobile first brands.
Even those that were historically not even digital, offline brands such as branks and retailers, many of which have launched apps and mobile optimised services to help engage audiences on their smartphones.
Due to this convergence, modern user journeys are incredibly complex.
Take travel for example.
Let’s take a look at people based attribution in practice.
Before we had saw two separate user journeys conducted across two different devices with the ultimate conversion happening on desktop and no understanding that the two users are the same person until just before the conversion event. (CLICK)
With people based attribution we get a much clearer view of the journey. We see it as one journey, not two.
Here we see that the most recent touchpoint prior to conversion was actually Facebook, but it simply happened on a different device.
With PBA we have the opportunity to personalize the buying journey, improve the customer experience, increase conversion and loyalty and, probably most importantly, stop wasting money retargeting users that bought from you weeks earlier!
You don’t waste money retargeting people who already booked on another device!
And there are many other ways in which people based attribution can greatly enhance your marketing effectiveness and improve the user experience.
Firstly, we’re seeing businesses diversifying their UA to web for a number of reasons.
It may be that they have a large amount of organic web traffic and they’re not leveraging that to drive app downloads.
Or they have other sources of traffic on the web that is highly cost effective, a partner site or affiliate network for example.
Or it might simply be that they want to avoid paying the app store revenue share for users that sign up in the app.
Ultimately, you may well have less unique users than you think, but by understanding better who they are and how they interact with your service you have a far greater opportunity to monetise them.
Users don’t pay the bills… loyal, sticky, happy users pays the bills.
So, going back to the beginning, there are many different benefits that you can derive as a marketer when you implement people based attribution, but the clue is in the name.
The most important aspect of it all is the user. Give the user a great experience and the rest should look after itself.
Come work with us!