Cross-platform analytics: Deep dive into benefits for various businesses

Users no longer follow a neat and organized path when interacting with products and services. The customer journey is much more complex than it used to be. Visitors use different platforms, often switching between native apps, mobile apps, and desktop browsing as they progress toward becoming clients.

For instance, customers could begin on the website and switch to the app. Alternatively, users may see your products on the app and prefer to see them on a bigger screen before purchasing. Tracking across different platforms helps better understand the customer journey regardless of direction.

Most mobile app and web analytics tools can only analyze one platform at a time, siloing user behavioral data into different tools or dashboards. Using a tool designed to perform cross-platform analytics offers a better approach to this problem.

This article will discuss the basics of cross-platform analytics and why it matters for various businesses, and explain how to use it to understand your customers better. In addition, you will discover some business-specific use cases and what a comprehensive cross-platform solution should offer.

What is cross-platform tracking?

Cross-platform tracking is the activity of collecting data and analyzing user behavior across multiple platforms. Thanks to cross-platform tracking, you can track users as they move between the website and mobile app (in both directions).

How it works: You can track the entire customer journey by employing an extension to the web tracking client and mobile SDKs. Keep events attached to the same visitor, even while switching from a native mobile app to a mobile web browser and vice versa.

Benefits of cross-platform tracking

Cross-platform data collection offers several benefits, particularly for businesses and marketers looking to understand consumer behavior and enhance their strategies. Here are some key advantages:

1. A holistic view of the customer journey: Cross-platform tracking provides an overview of the customer journey from initial contact to conversion across different platforms.
2. Improved targeting and personalization: Businesses can provide more relevant content and ads by understanding how users interact across platforms, increasing conversions and engagement.
3. Better campaign measurement: It helps marketers determine which platforms drive the most conversions and where resources should be allocated, as well as assess the effectiveness of their campaigns across different channels.
4. Enhanced user experience: By analyzing cross-platform behavior, businesses can ensure consistency and re-engagement strategies that appeal to users on their preferred platforms.
5. Reduced data silos: Using cross-platform tracking eliminates data silos and allows insights and analytics to be more unified, resulting in more informed decisions.
6. Identifying consumer trends: Businesses can stay ahead in product development and marketing by grasping consumer trends on various platforms.
7. Increased ROI: Data-driven marketing can help businesses improve their return on investment.

What are the uses of cross-platform tracking?

Analyzing user behavior across platforms is essential for companies that have both mobile apps and websites, especially in cases where users have multiple touchpoints with brands’ sites and apps before making a purchase.

Cross-platform tracking has a variety of applications across diverse industries and business functions, particularly in marketing, product development, banking, and ecommerce.

Let’s dive into business-specific use cases.

For marketers

Advertisers can use cross-platform tracking to estimate their ad performance and ROI more accurately. You won’t be able to see the complete customer journey if you use traditional attribution tools or the data provided by ad networks, which means that each campaign or ad network could be overestimated or underestimated. 

One of the common uses of cross-platform tracking is deep linking from the mobile browser to the mobile app, and vice-versa. Let’s say your company is web-first, but you also have a mobile app: thanks to deep links, you can send website visitors to your app install page. Deep linking-enabled journeys deliver higher conversion rates. Using deep linking, you can track and analyze user behavior across the entire user lifecycle, including re-engagement and acquisition campaigns.

As a marketer, you run several campaigns across multiple digital channels. A comprehensive cross-platform analytics solution allows you to integrate with Google Ads to track marketing campaign performance. This encompasses monitoring analytics for each campaign, including impressions, clicks, conversions, revenue, and cost per action (CPA). These insights allow you to assess how campaigns fare across platforms and introduce effective optimizations.

Marketers benefit from cross-platform marketing in many ways, including increased reach, enhanced targeting, improved engagement, consistent messaging, and higher conversion rates.

For product teams

Cross-platform tracking provides product teams with a complete overview of how users interact with the product, enabling them to understand user needs and challenges better.

Product teams can comprehensively view user behavior across various channels through cross-platform analytics. This allows them to recognize patterns and trends that might go unnoticed when examining customer data from separate platforms. As a result, they can better understand what users need and where they struggle, enabling them to use data to make informed decisions that enhance the user experience, boost engagement, and improve user retention.

Let’s say you are a SaaS company. Cross-platform tracking gives you information you need to enhance your funnel analysis and consequently improve user journey. 

A funnel is a series of steps that lead to an important event. Here are the steps users take to sign up for a SaaS site:

The funnel analysis shows how many users progress from one step to another and how many drop-offs occur. When many users struggle to finish a step or fail to do so, it indicates that there is excessive friction in that area. That’s the key area for you to target to boost conversion rates.

For banking

Cross-platform tracking allows financial institutions to grasp more user insights across the native app and web. But there are more uses.

Let’s say you have an app and a website. But you also use an app channel, an internal website accessible only via your banking app. You use an in-app browser from within the banking app to access this channel. Cross-platform tracking will help you capture more in-depth measurements of these pages and how your customers use the channel. You will see the funnel from the app to the app channel pages.

It provides seamless user experiences, improves operational efficiency, and embraces innovation through cross-platform data collection.

For ecommerce

By utilizing cross-platform tracking, you can gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of all your marketing channels’ performance. Analyzing the platform that drives the most traffic to your website can help you enhance it and increase customer conversions. This evaluation will also aid in recognizing the best-performing content or products, allowing you to prioritize them and guarantee their visibility on all platforms.

One of the use cases for cross-platform tracking is launching a webView inside an app to display web content within an app. It’s an efficient way for ecommerce to increase conversion rates and sales figures overall. WebView enables product pages and other web elements to be shown within an app. Whether you’ve built a site from scratch or have a Shopify store, webView allows for relevant online content to be easily accessible and works in tandem with native application features. It also helps simplify the maintenance of a consistent user experience.

This kind of analytics is also helpful when you monitor the performance of your content across multiple platforms. This monitoring can assist you in deciding whether investing time and effort in creating new content for those channels is worthwhile or if it would be more beneficial to concentrate on optimizing existing content.

How Piwik PRO facilitates cross-platform tracking?

Use Piwik PRO’s extension to web-tracking client and mobile SDKs to follow the full customer journey across the web and app. Using event analytics is the easiest way to track user behavior on websites, web applications, and mobile applications.

It’s now possible to track app and web data together, giving you a more accurate picture of the user’s journey. Having separate streams for iOS, Android, and the web allows for more granular analysis.

With Piwik PRO, you can:

1. Identify and track users between your native mobile app, webView and website.
2. Create a unified dashboard that aggregates data from these different sources.

See how Piwik PRO facilitates cross-platform tracking through various other features and capabilities designed to provide comprehensive analytics across multiple platforms:

1. Unified user profiles: Piwik PRO Customer Data Platform (CDP) creates a single user profile aggregating data from various platforms (web, mobile apps, etc.). This lets you see a complete view of user interactions and behaviors across all channels.
2. User ID tracking: Piwik PRO supports User ID tracking, which lets you assign unique identifiers to users. This enables accurate tracking of a number of users across different devices and sessions, maintaining continuity in data collection.
3. Custom event tracking: You can set up custom event tracking to monitor specific actions taken by users on different platforms, such as downloads, clicks, or form submissions. This helps understand user engagement across channels.
4. Integration with other tools: Piwik PRO integrates with various tools, enabling data sharing and collaboration across systems.
5. Data ownership and privacy compliance: Piwik PRO prioritizes data privacy, offering you control over your data. This is crucial for compliance with regulations (like GDPR, PIPEDA, or CCPA) as organizations collect data on user behavior across platforms.
6. Cross-domain tracking: For businesses with multiple domains or subdomains, Piwik PRO allows seamless tracking across them, ensuring that users are followed effectively throughout their journey, even when transitioning between sites.
7. Customizable dashboards and reports: Users can create personalized dashboards and reports that reflect cross-platform performance metrics, aiding in strategic decision-making and performance measurement.
8. Attribution modeling: Piwik PRO provides tools for attribution modeling, which helps you understand the contribution of each platform (web or app) to the conversion process, allowing for data-driven marketing decisions.
9. Heatmaps: It lets you quickly visualize user engagement with UI elements and features.
10. Real-time data processing: Real-time data capabilities enable you to observe user interactions across platforms and react swiftly to trends or issues.

By providing these features, Piwik PRO enables businesses to gain meaningful insights from cross-platform user data, facilitating improved marketing strategies, enhanced user experiences, and ultimately driving better business outcomes.