Measurement and attribution top challenges for getting mobile right
The explosion of mobile has made tracking and targeting consumers across devices increasingly challenging for marketers.
The explosion of mobile has made tracking and targeting consumers across devices increasingly challenging for marketers.
During the desktop/laptop era, marketers got spoiled by the availability of better analytics than they’d ever had in the offline world (with the possible exception of direct mail and DRTV). But the explosion of mobile use by consumers and business buyers is presenting unprecedented marketing challenges to agencies and marketing teams.
Some of these challenges relate to the increased difficulty of tracking and targeting users across devices environments. Others are a product of being required to reckon with the increasingly complex context of mixed desktop/mobile usage itself.
For example, some consumers only use mobile devices when interacting with social media. Even in Q4 of last year (2014) Facebook reported that 526 million of its monthly active users access Facebook solely from their mobile devices; that’s 38 percent of Facebook’s 1.39 billion monthly active users in Q4 of last year. Data regarding mobile usage exploding on many other social networks is similar – you’ve likely noticed such behavior when studying your own analytics data.
In October of 2015, Digiday and Marchex published a report, based on a survey of brand marketers, summarizing the challenges of mobile marketing. Measurement and attribution were cited as the top challenge by a wide margin.
“As mobile advertising budgets continue to grow, we’re seeing brands and agencies demand more accountability,” said Pete Christothoulou, chief executive of Marchex. “These results confirm that effective measurement and attribution of mobile advertising is a major challenge, and we anticipate growing demand for analytics solutions that can connect mobile behavior to real-world, offline actions.”
Consumers increasingly use mobile devices to make purchase decisions in the real world. In fact, offline purchases influenced by digital and mobile behavior will account for more than $1.5 trillion in consumer expenditures this year, according to data from Forrester. Consequently, retailers with store footprints have an even greater incentive to “get mobile right.”
According to Shagun Aulakh, senior marketing manager at Macy’s, who was quoted in the report, “Mobile has really pushed personalization to another level. We can’t just market to the mass consumer anymore. It’s necessary to really understand the full circle of a customer’s behavior and life and market to them in a way that speaks to them as individuals and give them info that’s as real-time as it gets.”
Let’s dig deeper into this report, available here.
Key findings include the following:
Even if you’re in a corporate or agency environment that’s less likely to take risks on new forms of media or tracking solutions, you should consider making a case for re-evaluating both your mobile media/marketing strategy as well as evaluating whether or not you have the analytics platforms in place to measure the mobile impact on sales and revenue.
*Sponsored content in collaboration with Marchex. Views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and do not necessarily reflect ClickZ’s opinions.
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