Cross Device Targeting

Cross Device Targeting is the process of delivering advertisements to the same users across multiple devices in an organized and scheduled manner.

Cookies and Mobile IDs (UUID, Apple’s IDFA etc.) allow advertisers to track and deliver targeted advertising to uniquely identifiable users.

Unfortunately, these technologies only allow user tracking on a single device or even on a specific app where the ID or cookie is available. Nowadays, a lot of users are switching between multiple devices to access the internet. That means, a person who uses e.g. three different devices for different purposes throughout the day will be viewed as three different users by companies using device-based targeting methods. Hence, cookies or mobile IDs are not sufficient anymore to track user profiles.

To solve this problem and track users across multiple devices, there are different techniques available:

• Isolate and link user data from various data collection sources (e.g. connect cookies with a UUID)
• use models to accurately infer a link between multiple data points and identify it as a single profile

The easiest way to link data from various data sources is to organize user log-ins through a “single sign-on” (SSO).