Tracking users across devices is the Holy Grail. Retargeting relevant advertising to people whether they are using mobile or desktop devices is a tough nut to crack. AdRoll, the US based-ad firm that launched here last week reckons it has a tool that allows advertisers to do just that using Facebook and Twitter data.
AdRoll claims to be the only firm that has an agreement with both Facebook and Twitter to use its data to identify users across mobile and desktop. The data is anonymised but AdRoll claims it knows with accuracy that one user on desktop is the same user on mobile.
As audiences fragment across devices, cookies lose their effectiveness at targeting user behaviour online. And there has been talk for a while that cookies are on their way out. After a US launch last month, AdRoll is now planning a local rollout.
Adam Berke, AdRoll president, said: “We're thinking of other ways to help businesses collect that customer data across devices that isn’t related to cookies.
Does it work? Berke is bullish.
“We do a handshake with Facebook and Twitter on the back end to say this is user 12345 – they know that is user ABCD in their system so when they see that user on a device they can trigger AdRoll. It gives us the most possible precision, in the most prominent ad units on the most widely used apps.”
Berke claims other retargeting platforms attempt to track users across devices using “probabilistic” methods which look at user patterns on mobile and desktop and identifies those that have similar characteristics.
“Because they are inherently probabalistic they are also inherently wrong a certain percentage of the time. None of them were accurate enough to execute the kind of campaigns we run. We’ve gone the other way which is definitive IDs. You don’t have to guess at the IDs, people are logged into both [mobile and desktop] with the same [Facebook and Twitter] account so we know they are the same person.”
AdRoll opened its first Australia office earlier this month and hopes to grow from seven to 20 staff this year and take a larger slice of retargeting market here from existing players including Google and Criteo. It has 400 active clients in Australia and wants to grow this significantly. The Sydney office is led by Ben Sharp.
Adtech companies around the world are working on post-cookie solutions. It emerged last year that Google was working on a project called AdID. With media consumption increasingly taking place via moble devices, and some browser manufacturers making cookie-less browsing the standard option, some advertising businesses have expressed concerns that a shift away from cookies could undermine an advertising system built around them.
Others argue it will foster innovation and force the industry to move away from just dropping cookies and come up with better advertising. Others still, such as Southern Cross Austereo director of digital and innovation Clive Dickens, suggest that people will have to hand over data in return for content other than that sloshing freely around the web.
"Increasingly you won't get a quality service without signing in," he told AdNews. "If you are an ad-funded business, in any shape of form, you have to consider single sign in. Advertisers want more. You have to have first party data."
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