Find answers to common questions about Singular's Cross-Device Attribution. Make sure to read Introduction to Cross-Device Attribution first.
Note: Cross-Device Attribution is an enterprise feature. To learn more about enabling this feature, reach out to your Customer Success Manager.
Cross-Device Basics
Singular uses advertiser-reported IDs to tie different devices to the same user. The advertiser is responsible for establishing identity. We rely on users needing to authenticate to tie together different activities across platforms.
We believe this approach is the most aligned with recent privacy regulations and increasing scrutiny around privacy.
No, users have to authenticate, i.e., register or sign in, for us to see that it is the same user.
Yes, because users often change devices, resulting in your paid campaigns reporting inflated outcomes. Cross-Device Attribution is also relevant for companies running paid advertising for multiple products who often utilize cross-promotion, as you may want to understand which campaigns yield new users vs. not.
At this point, we don't provide this capability, and we understand most partners cannot support it yet. We are working with selected partners to understand how this can be supported to fuel optimization. Reach out to your Customer Success Manager with any specific partner requests.
Onboarding
First, integrate the Singular SDK in all the relevant platforms. Find the relevant SDKs in our SDK Section. Make sure every SDK implementation is properly reporting Custom User IDs to Singular. These are the calls that allow us to identify users.
Then, use our tracking link tools for mobile and web to leverage our data governance capabilities and ensure data is tracked with the right parameters that will later allow for clean, normalized reporting.
Yes. A core differentiator of Singular as a mobile attribution provider is the ability to import your historical device data.
For cross-device, we've extended this capability to users as well as devices. This is important in order to ensure that both device-based cohorts and user-based cohorts are aligned with your data before you start using Singular's attribution solution.
You can customize your events using our Custom Events page. For example, you may want to define a Web Revenue event that captures revenue on the website, and a Mobile Revenue event that captures revenue on all mobile platforms altogether. Alternatively, you could also break down revenue individually by platform. The same logic can be applied for any type of event, to provide full visibility into what your campaigns are yielding across every platform.
App Install campaigns should be tracked with Singular Links, as the install event is tracked by a mobile SDK. Web campaigns should be set up with website links, that are direct URLs leading to a website, which has our Web SDK.
Advanced Topics
In web-to-app tracking, users on the mobile web interact with a banner to either install or open the mobile app (often utilizing deferred deep links and Universal/App links), moving from the mobile web to a mobile app in a single continuous session. In this scenario, users are often anonymous when visiting the website, but the link placed in the banner allows for accurate tracking with a mobile tracking link.
Cross-device attribution does not necessarily involve a banner, and the user may interact with different platforms at very different times. Cross-device is also relevant when one of the platforms is a desktop computer.
Today we only calculate cohorts based on registration (sign-up). However, supporting this scenario is on our roadmap. If this is of interest to you, reach out to your Customer Success Manager to let us know.