The customer journey is just as important as offering the highest quality product or service. The days of offering just the best product or service are in the past. Now, your business must also give customers the best experience possible in order to win their business and retain their loyalty. With the number of brands operating across the globe, the customer is in a position to go with whoever offers them the highest value and most pleasurable journey. This means your company must use the right marketing attribution models to provide the most seamless customer journey. Once you understand the difference between mobile attribution and desktop attribution, you and your digital advertising agency team can determine what type of journey you need to provide your customers.
Mobile Attribution vs. Desktop Attribution
Mobile attribution is used to understand the types of marketing campaigns and media channels that will deliver specific goals. These goals can focus on app installations, click-through rates, submissions, or other actions that are vital to the customer journey and sales cycle. The actions completed by your customer during this journey will occur on a mobile-friendly device, such as a smartphone or tablet. The information that is obtained drives optimization for customer acquisition campaigns and overall marketing performance.
Desktop attribution is used to understand the web pages and digital marketing efforts that drive traffic to a company’s website. This attribution will also review the customer touchpoints throughout the customer journey that are specific to the website and any PPC campaigns being run on search engines. The data can come from any web page, whether it through the mobile version of your website or the desktop version.
Value Of Marketing Attribution
When it comes to marketing attribution, it is important to understand the values that both mobile and desktop attributions can provide your business. Each type provides unique insights that allow your digital advertising agency team and yourself to fully understand your customer journey. In order to successfully analyze your current marketing efforts, you must evaluate the data obtained through both attributions.
In regards to the value of mobile insights, you can fully understand how individuals complete specific actions while on their smartphones or tablets. Understanding where they click, how they get to your app or website, and what touchpoints they are utilizing to learn more about your business are incredibly valuable to improving the customer journey.
On the other hand, desktop attribution values are also important. Learning how traffic arrives to your website and what content marketing pages are responsible for educating your customers helps you determine which marketing strategies are performing the best. Furthermore, it allows you to evaluate the ROI your digital advertising agency is able to provide to your business.
Challenges With Each Attribution Type
As with all things in digital marketing, each type of attribution comes with its own unique challenges. It is important to understand what these challenges are in order to properly analyze the data and understand where some interpretation of the numbers may be required.
Mobile attribution can be difficult to trace with 100 percent certainly. This is largely due to the limitations of tracking touchpoints. It is impossible to determine if you have outlined every single engagement point for your customers. While you can certainly get close, you cannot know if your customer followed the journey you have predicted. Additionally, not every individual who purchases a product or service from your company will have access to a smartphone or tablet. This means that the data compiled from this attribution will eliminate a portion of your total audience.
In regards to desktop attribution, some of the challenges include assessing if the customer utilized multiple devices to discover information about your company. It is possible for one customer to use two, three, five, or more devices. If they opt-out of cookie tracking, it will be difficult for you to identify each desktop attributed interaction and link it to a single customer. This can cause your data tracking to be skewed and create multiple customers when, in fact, all of these engagements were completed by a single individual.
Trust Your Digital Advertising Agency To Provide The Right Customer Journey
Each attribute type is incredibly important for your business to understand. Otherwise, you cannot provide the best type of customer journey for those who are interested in your business. As our world continues to aggressively move into mobile prioritization, mobile attribution is incredibly important to focus your resources on. If your customers cannot easily learn, browse, and shop for your offering from their favorite devices, they will find another company that makes the process simpler. Additionally, this attribution type will ensure you fully understand what actions lead to your specified goals.
On the other hand, desktop attribution is still vitally important. This type of attribution ensures you understand how the deliverables produced by your digital advertising agency impact your customer journey. Between content marketing and social media efforts, desktop attribution helps you understand what drove traffic to your website.
Depending on your business, it may be in your best interest to use one or both attribution models. The best way to determine this information is to trust in a digital advertising agency like Digilant. We can help you understand your customer journey and identify what actions need to be taken to help your business grow. Please do not hesitate to contact us today!