What is Cross Platform Targeting and How Does it Work?

In order to understand Cross Platform Advertising, it’s important to first understand its foundation, Mobile Conquesting™, one of our most popular products. It’s also one of the more advanced and sophisticated products we offer.

With Mobile Conquesting™, targeting people on their mobile devices (smart phones and tablets), we have the ability to target people by online behaviors and offline behaviors. When we target with online behaviors, we are targeting people who have shown specific behaviors online or are in a certain demographic and showing them the advertiser’s ads. When we target them by offline behaviors, we are targeting people by where they have been tracked with their phone recently, such as a location, business, or specific brand name store. This is the first layer of a Mobile Conquesting™ campaign.

The second layer of Mobile Conquesting™ campaigns incorporates all sorts of “geo” terms. These “geo” terms include Geo-fencing, Geo-Retargeting, and Geo-Retargeting Look-a-like.

Geo-Fencing – when you target people in real time while at a competitor’s or specific locations or brand name businesses and try to serve them the advertiser’s ads – no targeting categories added in. This means you try to serve ads to anyone in this fence regardless of age, gender, income level, etc. When doing this at a competitor’s location is can also be called Geo-Conquesting although it is the same as a geo-fence.

Geo-Retargeting is when you target people who have been to a location you specify (i.e. a competitor’s location, an event, etc.) and serve them the advertiser’s ads. We can geo-retarget people from geo-fenced location.

Geo-Retargeting Lookalike is when we target people who are in the same neighborhoods as people you are Geo-Retargeting. In other words, they neighbors to the people you served ads to in the Geo-Fence.

When it comes to Geo-Fencing, not all Geo-Fences are created equal. There are different methods mobile technology vendors use for Geo-Fencing businesses:

Radial Fence by Address – The most basic method of location-based Geo-Fencing is by placing a radius around a location’s address. Since addresses were built to provide directions to the location, many times the physical location is across the parking lot or on the street. Research estimates that there can be up to 84% waste in targeting this way.

Radial Fence by Geo-Code – This method places a radius around the center of a business or location. Since most locations are not circular, there will inherently be waste. How much waste depends on the size of the radius. Research estimates that there can be up to 75% waste in targeting this way.

Parcel Mapping -Also known as property mapping and tax mapping are maps typically built to identify property boundaries and is a popular data source for industries such as real-estate. Parcels can often contain many businesses in the same plot. Research estimates that there can be up to 51% waste in targeting this way.

Polygon Mapping (This is the technology that we use with Mobile Conquesting™) – Polygons are formed by tracing the store or place boundary based on satellite images and latitude/longitude and capture the precise boundaries of a location. Percent waste = 0%

 

There are a few more capabilities of this popular product we call Mobile Conquesting™:

Address Targeting & Address Retargeting where we can take a list of households you want to target and show ads to people when they are on their mobile devices inside their home and when they leave their home with their phone.

On-Site Visit Tracking where we can track people who are served an advertiser’s ad and then physically come to the advertiser’s location withing 14 days of seeing the ad on their mobile device.

 

Now, the latest addition to Mobile Conquesting™:

Cross Platform Targeting

We are able to follow people that have been served an Mobile Conquesting™ ad (whether they have clicked on it or not) when they go on to other digital ad platforms and served other types of ads such as:
Display Ads

Native Display Ads

Facebook/Instagram Ads

Video Pre-Roll Ads

Social Mirror™ Ads

When the user is served the Mobile Conquesting™ ad, a “Universal Pixel” is deployed with it. It organizes the digital device ID associated with an individual across all their devices. It’s built when a user does something online to connect their IDs to other IDs associated with them across multiple digital devices. Basically, the Universal Pixel is finding that user on other advertising platforms by identifying that person (anonymously) and other devices they use.

What Is The Technology Behind Cross Platform Targeting?

How does the Universal Pixel gather information about a person and track him or her onto other ad platforms and other devices?

When an internet user visits a digital property (website or app) that uses technology that integrates with our Mobile Conquesting™ advertising platform, it can collect certain information about the user’s visit (regardless of whether or not the person has clicked on the ad), such as:

1. Information about the user’s browser including: the type of browser you use, browser language, browser settings, and cookie information.

2. Information about your device including device operating system version, connection type, device make, device model, IP address from which the device accesses that website or device identifiers such as your IDFA, AAID or MAIDs.

IDFA is the abbreviation for Identifier For Advertisers on Apple mobile devices. Every iOS device comes with an identifier that tracks activity for advertising purposes. AAID is the abbreviation for Google Advertising ID for Android devices which is when ad inventory bid requests from Android devices pass on to the advertising platform the AAID, which provides the same type of device-specific, unique, resettable ID for advertising as the IDFA. A Mobile Ad ID abbreviation is MAID and is a unique, anonymous identifier provided by the mobile device’s operating system. MAIDs help both marketers and publishers understand who is using their app and help identify and associate consumers. Just like hashed email addresses, MAIDs serve as anonymous identifiers that help combat privacy issues. MAIDs are universal across applications.

3. Location information, including precise location information when location services have been enabled for an app on the user’s device that has integrated our ad platform’s technology or that sends that information to our ad platform we are using.

4. Information about your activity on a digital website or app such as browsing history, viewing history, search history and information regarding an individual’s interaction with a website, app, or advertisement, including the time web pages or apps were visited or used, including in-game or online viewing activity (e.g., videos viewed, pages viewed).

5. Inferences or audience segmentation derived from the ad platform data, such as individual profiles, preferences, characteristics, and behaviors.

6. Information about ads served, viewed or clicked on, including the type of ad, where the ad was served, whether the user clicked on it.

7. Information about your internet service including information about which internet service provider is used by the user.

When the user visits a website or app and is shown your ad, we assign a random unique identifier to the user’s browser or device, which allows the ad platform we use to automatically recognize your browser or device the next time it visits another website or app that has integrated our technology. The ad platform uses cookies, beacons, pixels, tags, mobile SDKs, and similar technologies to collect this information.

With this Cross Platform Targeting, it’s an opportunity to show that same message to them on any other device they use.

A few things to note about Cross Platform Targeting.

•  This is not compatible with OTT, Online Audio, Amazon Targeting, Native Video, Household IP Targeting, Google PPC or YouTube.
• You are targeting the same people you choose to target with the Mobile Conquesting™ ads, when those people go onto the other ad product you choose. And it can be seen on ANY device the person uses (not just mobile). This allows you to not only serve ads on their mobile device, but also follow them across any of the above mentioned connected devices.
• To be targeted across different ad platforms, the user does not have to click and go to the client’s website. They just need to be served the ad.
• Not everyone who has been served the Mobile Conquesting™ ad will we be able to follow with the Universal Pixel onto the other ad platform. Usually about 50% of the people served a Mobile Conquesting™ ad can be followed onto the other ad platforms.
• If you choose Facebook as your add-on for Cross Platform Targeting, you can choose to target people across ALL of the Facebook owned ad platforms (what we call Facebook Premium) as well as Instagram.
• The ad platform that you choose still has the same ad restrictions as if you were to do a full campaign on one of those four platforms.

A few benefits of Cross Platform Targeting:

Cross Platform Targeting will help with conversions on the advertiser’s website because it reaches those people on all devices. Remember, on Mobile campaigns, you see fewer conversions on the advertiser’s website due to people’s fast paced actions on their mobile. But, showing the ad on all devices allows people the time to convert, especially from desktops and laptops.

Since Facebook’s tightest geo-fence is only 1-mile, you can now use Mobile Conquesting™’s Geo-Fencing to target a specific business and then follow those individuals onto Facebook/Instagram.

 

As you can see, technology continues to advance, and so do we. We want to continue to help your business reach the ideal customer for you, and we’ve definitely been able to do that with this new enhancement to Mobile Conquesting™.