Impacts of Mobile Usage on Marketing Campaign Management in 2023

If all digital activities have shown clear growth in the last few years, mobile stands out. And for good reason. Despite being second to desktop, which still accounts for 46% of digital transactions, mobile continues to progress the most with a 35% increase in conversions from 2016 to 2017. Furthermore, 56% of internet traffic is concentrated on mobile.

So, what are the consequences? With the rise of mobile and the proliferation of cross-device paths, it has become urgent for advertisers to have a unified view of user journeys in order to fully leverage the performance of each device. However, digital players face several limitations in achieving this Holy Grail.

Let’s delve into the explanations.

Challenges in Collecting Marketing Data via Mobile for Mobile Marketing

With the dominance of desktop, tracking tools were primarily reliant on cookies, text files stored on users’ hard drives for data collection. However, the surge in mobile usage has disrupted this established order, giving rise to new requirements.

The Mobile App Challenge: Enhancing Mobile Marketing Strategies

Mobile apps do not utilize cookies. Instead, advertisers can only measure the performance of their applications through an SDK (Software Development Kit), which allows them to understand their impact within the overall user journey.

Cookies and Mobile Tracking: Insights for Mobile Ad Campaigns

The use of cookies is not possible in mobile applications, and even their application in 3rd party mobile web browsers for marketing purposes faces resistance from web giants like Safari, which has rejected their use since September 2017. This poses an initial challenge to accurately evaluate mobile’s role within the digital ecosystem of advertisers.

Cross-Device Reconciliation: Maximizing Marketing Impact on Smartphones

After data collection, reconciling the data is the second key aspect for holistic reconstitution of the user journey across devices.

Two methods can achieve this objective:

The deterministic method relies on a User ID acting as a reconciliation key to connect cross-device behaviors of the same client. While reliable in many respects, this method cannot offer 100% complete reconciliation.

The probabilistic method utilizes additional user data, such as IP address, visit time, user location, etc., to calculate the probability of two profiles from different devices belonging to a single user. This method is more complex and less precise but can be more reliable with a larger number of user profiles and more granular information fed into the algorithm.

Depending on the methodology chosen by the advertiser and the available data sample, mobile may once again experience biased performance and devaluation of its role, particularly in initiating conversion paths that conclude on desktop or tablet.

Measurement and Management: Leveraging Cross-Device Reconciliation for Mobile Marketing

Adapting the Message: Mobile Marketing Strategies for Smartphones

By offering a unified view of e-commerce performance, cross-device reconciliation ultimately guides advertisers in choosing a communication strategy that is as granular as possible, including content, format, broadcast time, media, channel, etc.

Adopting a Global Strategy: Utilizing Mobile Marketing Tools and Strategies

Encourage website visitors to download applications through mobile retargeting campaigns; re-engage mobile users on social networks after tracking their visits to physical stores using geolocation tags (Beacon)… Implementing a 360-degree strategy reveals numerous opportunities provided by this reconciliation, even blending online and offline channels.

Redefining Budgets and Customer Experience in Mobile Marketing

To optimize budgets by device, this approach also highlights opportunities to be seized and the specific limitations of each device. This allows for an optimal reallocation of investments by device and the adoption of a less intrusive strategy that is more tailored to the expectations of each user.

Mobile Marketing: Tomorrow’s Opportunities and Limitations

Both for the unparalleled customer experience it promises and for the implementation of a 360-degree digital strategy, cross-device reconciliation carries strong hopes in the digital world but continues to face important limitations.

On the issues of tracking, as well as the handling of mobile data, marketers must demand collection tools that can be used on all terminals to regain the advantage over their customer data… and finally offer themselves a holistic vision of the media mix to be deployed on each of the devices.