How to Make the Most of Cross-Device Tracking

In an ideal world, customers complete their purchase or convert on a single device and within one session. But the reality is that they switch between devices and digital environments like mobile apps, websites, social media platforms, and others. Besides, they might engage with your ads and content numerous times before converting.

Now, imagine trying to figure out which specific channels generate the most conversions for your brand. If you’re using traditional analytics to monitor your customers’ behavior and preferences, it could be a headache.

Cross-device tracking is like GPS for marketing. It doesn’t just tell you where a user started their customer journey, it shows you how they moved across devices and platforms to convert. In this article, you’ll learn the importance of tracking cross device analytics and how you can make the most of it.

Key Takeaways:

• Cross-device tracking links user activity across different devices to provide a comprehensive analysis of their behavior and preferences.
• The major methods of cross device tracking are deterministic and probabilistic tracking.
• The technical step-by-step process of cross-device tracking includes data collection, server-side tracking, linking devices, and unifying user identities.

What Is Cross-Device Tracking?

Cross-device tracking is a digital marketing and analytics strategy that collects and analyzes user behavior data across multiple devices, such as mobile devices like smartphones, tablets, PCs, and smart TVs.

This technique is widely adopted by businesses and digital marketers to gain a cohesive view of user profiles and their interactions, regardless of the device used.

It works by linking different activities on various devices to a particular user through shared identifiers like cookies, login credentials, and device IDs. For instance, a user might see your brand’s Instagram ad on their smartphone, compare different options on their tablet, and complete the purchase using their laptop.

Without cross device analytics, there’d be no way to connect these activities to a single, unified customer profile and buying journey. You’d treat them as unique, separate visits, giving you a disjointed insight into how and when your customers convert.

On the other hand, tracking cross device bolsters accurate attribution, personalized ad targeting, and improved campaign effectiveness.

Why Is Cross-Device Tracking Important?

The average internet user will own at least 15 devices by 2030. And as the devices grow in number, the more connected they become. For example, when you log into Chrome on different devices using the same Google account, you can access your browsing history, bookmarks, and saved passwords across all devices. You can switch between devices and not lose your flow.

This is the seal of approval for cross-device tracking. So here are some reasons why it’s a crucial pillar of business success.

Comprehensive Customer Journey Insight

Businesses that don’t leverage cross-device tracking can basically only rely on methods like cookies to track customer activities on smartphones and computers. But classic cookie tracking is “dying out”, plus this has numerous limitations and blind spots since it can’t monitor users from one device to another. On the other hand, cross-device can give you in-depth insights into user behavior and customer journeys.

Improved Ad Attribution

Topping that, cross-device tracking enhances attribution modeling by identifying devices, channels, and campaigns that drive the most conversions or churn customers. This helps marketers allocate their budgets more effectively and focus on high-performing channels.

Personalized Multi-Channel Messaging

The insights from cross-device tracking allow you to understand your target audience’s preferences and the messaging that relates to them most. You can then tailor consistent and relevant copy, ads, and content based on their behavior or preferences for effective cross-channel marketing.

Improved User Experience

Moreover, it enhances the experience for your customers by streamlining continuity as they switch between devices. This is good for customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Main Challenges of Cross-Device Tracking

Without any doubt, such tracking is powerful, but it’s also quite challenging. Here’s why:

• Technical issues: different devices track data differently, which can result in inconsistent tracking, incomplete user profiles, and data gaps. For example, iOS devices are harder to track than Android devices.
• Privacy and data regulations: GDPR and CCPA are strict on personal data collection, and users are more aware and sensitive to privacy issues, so it’s harder to track them without explicit consent.
• Data integration issues: merging data from different apps, devices, and platforms into a single, unified user profile is complex. It often leads to mismatched formats, conflicting user IDs, and time zone inconsistencies.
• User identification: it’s hard to identify one user across different devices, especially if they aren’t logged into the same account, which may cause fragmented data and inaccurate attribution.
• Changing user behavior: users often switch devices many times per day, and the increased usage of mobile apps reduces the effectiveness of traditional tracking methods like cookies.

What do these challenges highlight? Essentially, the need for robust and specialized ad-tracking software if you want to really make the most of the data you collect.

What Is Cross-Device Attribution?

Okay, but does cross-device attribution refer to something completely different? Let’s dot the i’s on these concepts.

Cross-device tracking collects the puzzle pieces. It focuses on collecting the data and identifying and monitoring a user’s behavior across multiple devices.

On the other hand, cross-device attribution goes a step further and puts the puzzle pieces together. It interprets the data and analyzes which touchpoints actually influenced the final conversion, whether it was an ad click on a mobile phone or a product search on a laptop.

It measures user interactions across different devices, assigns credit, and provides a complete picture of the customer journey by linking their interactions. It lets marketers evaluate the effectiveness of each campaign and touchpoint that leads to a desired action, such as completing a purchase or installing an app, regardless of the device or channel used.

Without accurate tracking, attribution is flawed. Also, simply monitoring user behavior isn’t sufficient to measure marketing effectiveness. Cross-device attribution helps businesses understand which interactions drive results and where to invest for the best return on ad spend (ROAS).

What Are Some Methods of Cross-Device Tracking?

There are different approaches to cross device tracking, varying based on available data and the level of precision needed. The two main methods are deterministic and probabilistic tracking.

Deterministic Tracking

Deterministic tracking uses unique, user-provided personally identifiable information (PII), like login credentials, email addresses, and account IDs, to link devices to a single user.

For example, when you sign into Facebook on both your smartphone and laptop, deterministic cross-device tracking accurately links the activities on the devices to you.

Deterministic tracking is highly accurate and reliable since it relies on first-party data and exact data points. It’s the preferred method for companies that have access to user accounts, such as social media platforms, streaming services, and e-commerce websites, since their users are often logged in across multiple devices.

But that doesn’t automatically make it the better choice, since it’s limited to environments where users are logged in. It fails to track anonymous users or new visitors without PII, making it less scalable for businesses without access to large databases of registered users.

Probabilistic Tracking

Probabilistic tracking uses statistical algorithms and anonymized data points to determine user identity and the connection between devices.

It analyzes non-personal attributes, such as device type, IP address, operating system, screen resolution, location, browsing behavior, time zones, and Wi-Fi networks, to estimate the ‘probability’ that different devices belong to the same user.

This cross-device tracking method is scalable as it can track both anonymous and logged-out users. It’s especially useful to small, growing businesses lacking access to large data sets of PII.

However, it’s less accurate than deterministic tracking because it relies on estimates rather than precise matches. While modern machine learning algorithms can improve its accuracy, there’s still a margin of error. For example, there may be errors when multiple users share similar device attributes, such as a Wi-Fi network in a household.

Here’s a comparison table to recap all of the above:

	Deterministic Tracking	Probabilistic Tracking
How it works	Uses unique user data (e.g., emails, account IDs) to match devices to individuals	Uses statistical models and non-personal info (e.g., device type, IP) to estimate user identity
Pros	Highly accurate and uses first-party data	Scalable and can track anonymous and logged-out users
Cons	Only works when users are logged in, can’t track anonymous users	Less precise: relies on probability, not certainty
Best for	Businesses with many registered or logged-in users (e.g., social media, streaming, e-commerce)	Smaller businesses without large PII databases

How Does Cross Device Tracking Work?

Let’s break down the technical process of cross-device tracking, using both deterministic and probabilistic methods, and see how they work in real-world scenarios.

1. Collecting Data

Start by collecting user data through various touchpoints of your marketing campaigns. This may include web visits, app usage, ad clicks, email interactions, and form submissions.

The data can be collected through old-school methods like browser cookies. These are small files stored on a browser to track the user’s activity across multiple devices. Once a cookie is stored on the user’s browser, the website can retrieve it when the user visits the same site on a different device and link the activity.

But cookies aren’t sufficient for cross platform attribution since the customer journey isn’t always linear, and they experience various touchpoints and devices before converting. So, it is best to use other data points like device IDs, login credentials, IP addresses, and behavioral data for more accurate data collection.

2. Applying Server-Side Tracking

Cookies, third-party tags, and pixels are great for data collection. But more than a quarter of internet users globally today have ad blockers. And regulatory bodies are increasingly clamping down on third-party cookies.

How do you bypass ad blockers? Server-side tracking could be the answer. Instead of relying on the user’s browser, server-side tracking happens on the advertiser’s server and uses first-party cookies. This gets around ad-blockers, browser inconsistencies, broken connections, and cookie deletion.

Server-side tracking also prioritizes privacy-first ad tracking and enhances data security. This means that sensitive information is processed and anonymized before being sent to the third-party analytics platform. This heps you stay compliant and also increases control and flexibility.

As such, by default, a tracking solution like RedTrack provides an easy way to adopt server-side tracking for all major marketing channels, such as Google, Bing, Facebook, TikTok, ClickBank, and others.

3. Identifying Device Connections

After data collection, you can start linking the devices your customers are using to interact with your brand. You should get an accurate evaluation of the channels serving as the first and last touchpoints.

The process of linking devices varies depending on the cross-device tracking method used. Here are examples to help you understand how deterministic and probabilistic tracking link devices:

Option 1: Using deterministic tracking

Let’s assume Kate uses the Amazon app on her smartphone to search for running shoes while at work. After work, she logs into Amazon on her laptop to complete the purchase. Your tracking system can confidently attribute the purchase to the earlier browsing session on the phone since both sessions are tied to the same user. In the background, it logs both sessions under the same user so that you can see the whole customer journey. This facilitates precise tracking and personalized product recommendations across devices.

Option 2: Using probabilistic tracking

Let’s say Pete visits a travel website using his home Wi-Fi via a tablet and later uses a laptop connected to the same internet to book a vacation. He didn’t log in, but the tracking system notes that both sessions occurred from the same IP, at the same time, and behaved the same way. Based on these patterns, the system estimates that both sessions belong to the same user.

4. Unifying the User Profiles

Once deterministic and probabilistic links are made, the system creates a unified user profile. This profile becomes a central reference point for all user activity, regardless of the device used or how they interact with your content.

The unification process involves matching user identifiers across sessions and devices and storing that data in a centralized system, typically a CRM, Customer Data Platform (CDP), or a cross-device tracking platform like RedTrack.

The user profiles then store the customer’s behavioral data, including:

• time spent on pages;
• past purchases or conversions;
• ads the user has seen or clicked on;
• devices they were on at each touchpoint;
• products they’ve viewed across devices and sessions.

Without a unified customer profile, your cross device analytics are fragmented and misleading. Whereas, aggregating interactions across all devices helps you avoid overcounting users, misattributing conversions, and missing important insights about preferences, behavior patterns, and drop-off points.

Concluding Thoughts on Cross Device Analytics

Understanding how your customers interact with your ads and eventually convert is a crucial part of business. But with the growing number of devices per user, collecting customer behavioral data and creating user profiles can be an uphill task.

But you can adopt the cross-device tracking strategy to break down silos, connect the dots throughout the whole customer journey, and get a complete picture of their preferences and behavioral patterns. The gains? You’ll personalize your messaging across all channels, boost conversions, achieve more accurate attribution, smarter ad targeting, and a streamlined customer experience.

RedTrack was designed to help you make the most out of your ad-tracking efforts. It is a robust tool that tracks your campaigns, connects data sources, and gathers everything into one seamless dashboard. Plus, it delivers centralized tracking and seamless attribution across all channels, whether paid, organic, email, or partnerships.

It uses server-to-server and API integrations from major ad networks like Google, Facebook, and TikTok, bypassing restrictions like iOS privacy updates and ad blockers. And 200+ integrations are available across e-commerce platforms, ad and affiliate networks, call trackers, and more, so getting started is easier than one might think. If you’d like to see how it works, you are welcome to sign up for a trial and see it in action for free.