What Is Cross-Device Targeting in Advertising?
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Pathlabs Marketing |
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May 24th, 2024 |
Do you know the ins and outs of cross-device targeting? Are you sure? When you begin to wrap your head around this topic, it may be more intricate than you initially think.
This blog aims to demystify cross-device targeting, explore its fundamental ideas, and discuss why it's often challenging to execute effectively.
What Is Cross-Device Targeting?
Cross-device targeting refers to the practice of targeting ads to specific audiences as they engage across multiple devices.
Cross-device targeting is a newer concept in digital advertising with similar tones to cross-device tracking and attribution.
These concepts have surfaced due to the proliferation of devices consumers use nowadays, such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, and Connected TVs (CTVs).
Since users engage across several devices daily, the ultimate goal of cross-device methodologies is to create systems where ad platforms can track, identify, and consistently target the same users with ads as they engage across web locations from their multiple devices.
How Cross-Device Targeting Works
Cross-device targeting works by having ad platforms identify and target ads to the same users within an audience across their different devices.
To grasp how cross-device targeting works, you must first understand the basics of device-level and audience targeting tactics.
Device-Level Targeting
Ad platforms offer device-level targeting, which allows media teams to specify which devices their ads can display on – these device options depend on the channel.
Once the campaign launches, ads serve to users on these eligible devices. However, if a single user sees the same ad on more than one device, the platform cannot guarantee it knows that this is the same user.
Audience Targeting
Almost all ad platforms enable sophisticated audience-data targeting using first-party data, third-party data, pixel, or lookalike audience lists. These lists include target users assigned unique identifiers.
Once the campaign launches, the ad platform seeks to find, match, and serve ads to users on these lists, verifying or effectively guessing who they are via their identifiers.
New Wave of Cross-Device Targeting
Cross-device targeting synthesizes elements of both device-level and audience-data targeting.
Media teams select an audience list and designate specific devices for targeting. The platform then tries to find and target ads to these users.
However, with cross-device targeting, the ad platform takes things a step further.
The platform not only strives to identify and serve ads to the target users as they interact across various web locations but also aims to recognize and engage these users across their different devices.
For instance, if a user engages with certain web locations via their smartphone and later their desktop, the goal of cross-device targeting is for the ad platform to seamlessly identify and target the user with an ad during each separate device session.
The effectiveness of an ad platform in managing cross-device targeting depends on sophisticated backend processes. Typically, the platform must collect user data and IDs across multiple devices. It then employs a combination of deterministic and probabilistic audience matching techniques, supplemented by machine learning algorithms and device and identity graphs.
These tools enable the platform to link users across their devices into a single, coherent profile, which the platform can subsequently target.
Challenges and Considerations
The principal challenge of cross-device targeting is accurately identifying and targeting ads to users across a range of web locations and devices.
As mentioned, effective cross-device targeting requires:
A well-defined audience list with specific identifiers for each user.
The platform's ability to accurately identify and link these users across their various devices and integrate this data into a cohesive identity graph.
The platform’s ability to consistently serve ads to these users across their devices — ensuring the accuracy of user identification.
However, several factors complicate these requirements:
Many platforms are grappling with the phase-out of cookies and integration of alternative tracking methods like universal identifiers. These changes make simple tracking, attribution, and behavioral targeting more challenging and uncertain. So, applying these methods across multiple devices amplifies these difficulties.
Every device can have different IDs and user profiles associated with it, which increases the complexity of linking these identifiers and devices to a single user.
Enhanced privacy regulations and safety measures allow users to opt out of targeting and tracking. These options vary by device and can exclude users from being targeted or included in device graphing.
Emerging Technologies in Cross-Device Targeting
Currently, large ad tech firms and walled garden platforms predominantly offer forms of cross-device targeting.
Walled Garden Platforms
Platforms like Google, Meta, and Amazon require users to log in with a deterministic identifier, such as an email or phone number, for every session on each device. This requirement enables these platforms to create unified, cross-device user profiles.
When media teams launch campaigns on these platforms, they can choose a custom audience created by the platform or activate their own, specifying which devices to target.
This arrangement provides somewhat greater certainty that their ads could reach these users as they interact with the platform across different devices. However, despite this increased precision, no mechanism allows media teams to control the exact rate or timing of ad delivery across devices.
The Trade Desk
The Trade Desk offers cross-device targeting features by leveraging its extensive network of publishers and data providers, its proprietary (now open source) UID system, and identity and device graphing capabilities – working to connect users and households across various devices. Media teams can enable this cross-device feature, opening up opportunities to potentially identify and serve ads to users across devices.
Beyond these platforms, numerous vendors in the ad tech space continue to innovate in cross-device tracking, attribution, and targeting technologies. Despite these advancements, the industry still faces significant challenges in seamlessly tracking and connecting users across web locations and devices, which currently limits the effectiveness of cross-device targeting.
The Benefits of Cross-Device Advertising
The perceived benefit of cross-device advertising is the creation of multiple touchpoints, stretching not just web locations but devices as well. This additional cross-device targeting layer theoretically increases user ad exposures across devices, increasing their propensity to engage and move down the funnel.
Strategies for Cross-Device Targeting
While ad tech providers and platforms are advancing new capabilities for targeting, tracking, and attribution across devices, the optimal strategy is to cautiously assess the effectiveness of cross-device targeting and explore its potential incrementally.
Currently, it is more reliable to continue using traditional device-level and audience data targeting techniques, which are more effective. Simply displaying ads across multiple devices does not inherently boost engagement or brand recall, which is the primary idea of cross-device targeting.
Instead, the priority should be targeting the devices that generate the most engagement and are most conducive to allowing the user to act.
For example, if the aim is to execute a campaign that drives traffic and increases form submissions, device-level targeting the devices that historically have demonstrated the highest performance and allow users to fill out a form easily might be more effective than implementing a broad cross-device targeting strategy.
In Conclusion…
Cross-device targeting, closely linked to cross-device tracking and attribution, involves targeting a consistent audience across multiple devices. This method extends beyond traditional device and audience targeting by striving to recognize users in a unified identity graph and targeting them across their devices.
However, due to current challenges in tracking and the complexity of linking users across devices, cross-device targeting remains an evolving concept.
For independent agencies still familiarizing themselves with cross-device targeting or needing guidance on its suitability for client campaigns, partnering with a Media Execution Partner (MEP) like Pathlabs is advantageous. We provide the expertise, workflows, and technology necessary for effective digital media execution, focusing on staying updated with advancements in digital media – like cross-device targeting.
As the landscape of cross-device targeting continues to evolve, Pathlabs remains vigilant and prepared as your MEP, ready to adapt and implement the latest digital media strategies.
