By Jed Wheeler, Director of Solutions Engineering
Some of the enduring sources of pain for digital marketers include associating consumers with their digital devices, and assembling the right data sources to establish those relationships. Over the past two years, cross-device targeting has become an established product category aimed at alleviating this pain, with several companies specializing in cross-device matching data. RadiumOne is integrated with all of them.
The challenge in using that data is twofold. First, one must validate its accuracy. Second, once it’s been applied to recognizable users, contextual data must be layered on to make it meaningful.
This month, RadiumOne released two significant products that help address these issues. The first is a cross-device data store, which allows us to to store, correlate, and cross-check third-party data with our proprietary cross-device data. That’s a big deal because we can now tie together broad site/app usage data from over 95 ad exchanges with data acquired via our deep software integrations with thousands of web sites and apps.
The second big release is Smart URL, an enhancement to our Po.st link shortening tool that enables deep linking. For a more in-depth look at that tool and how it empowers marketers, check out my recent post on the Po.st blog. The most significant item for this discussion is that, with Smart URL deep linking, marketers can benefit from 1-to-1 matching of mobile web and mobile app interactions – tying cookies and device identifiers together into a single cross-platform user profile using a deterministic (100% accurate) match. This is significant, because many companies that specialize in cross-device data build their so-called device graphs on probabilistic matching — a far weaker way of tying together consumer web and app engagement
Tying together data from mobile app and mobile web behavior seems like a simple task, but it’s surprisingly difficult. The problem is that the two systems use parallel forms of anonymous user identification — cookies on web and IDFA/GAID in native mobile apps. Unless you happen to be lucky enough to have a service that people regularly log into on both platforms (Facebook being the obvious example), there simply hasn’t been a good way to tie these data sets together. My recent post on protecting end user privacy goes into the nuts and bolts of this in more depth. To summarize, because they use different identifying technology, neither platform can see what’s going on in the other, and data can’t be easily passed back and forth without impacting the end user experience. Smart URL solves that problem.
So far, so good – identifying users across the three main digital mediums (desktop web, mobile web, and native apps) is a great start, but it’s only the first step. The real win for marketers is in tying together interest and behavior data by combining the previously platform-dependant data sets.
RadiumOne is in a unique position here because of the investments we’ve made in audience intelligence software. All programmatic media-buying solutions can see bidding data from the ad exchanges. Unlike other solutions, however, we are not limited to it. RadiumOne’s Po.st social analytics tool captures over 250 million desktop and mobile user actions per day across thousands of websites. Connect, our full-featured mobile app analytics and push notification tool, captures billions of in-app events from tens of millions of users per month. So our broadly-deployed audience intelligence software allows us to see what consumers are interested in and what they do in a way that is simply not available to other programmatic media-buying solutions. Our analytics software customers get top-of-the-line products for free and we get the anonymized usage data we need to help make your ad campaigns successful. It’s a win for everyone.
None of the individual pieces here are new, but combining them is a “chocolate in my peanut butter” moment. Unlike any other solution on the market, RadiumOne now has the data to create comprehensive cross-platform and cross-device user behavior and interest profiles and then take action on that data across all the major ad exchanges. No other programmatic solution can offer this combination of deep insight and cross-platform targeting.
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