Marketing Strategies

Mobile In-App Tracking

Advertisers are projected to spend roughly eight times more money trying to reach shoppers on mobile devices compared to desktop by 2023 according to data from eMarketer.

Part of the reason for that growth is because that’s where potential shoppers are initiating their search and discovery, spending more of their time and money on mobile

This means that advertisers and publishers in an affiliate network need to better understand mobile’s role in the path to purchase.

“This is where the eyeballs are, this is where the traffic is and as affiliate marketers we owe it to ourselves to be open-minded when it comes to approaching mobile,” says Ivan Pena, Senior Director of Product Adoption at Rakuten Advertising says. “Mobile gives us the most direct path to a target audience. It’s the closest we can get to someone without actually physically showing up in front of them.”

One of the best ways to understand mobile’s role in the path to online purchase is to enable in-app tracking.

What is mobile in app tracking?

Mobile in-app tracking allows advertisers to track conversions that occur on an advertiser’s mobile app, effectively allowing an advertiser to extend their campaigns to account for a mobile app user and ultimately to help them get a clearer view of their overall affiliate program.

How can I implement mobile in-app tracking?

Advertisers can use one of the seven different software development kits (SDKs) that Rakuten Advertising works with to create unique links that drive downloads of and purchases through an app. Each click on your unique link gets recorded on Rakuten Advertising’s affiliate network servers and the downloaded app will then notify the network of any commissionable events taken when a user clicked the unique link that took them to your app.

What is different about shoppers who use mobile apps?

Shoppers who download a mobile app tend to be more engaged.  People who shop in app tend to view more than four times as many products as they do through a mobile web experience. New users who use an app are twice as likely to return as those who visit on a mobile site.

Publishers benefit from being rewarded for driving traffic and conversions to an advertiser’s mobile app.

Pena along with Rakuten Advertising’s Aaron Contawe hosted a webinar in conjunction with Global Savings Group titled “In-app Tracking in Affiliate: Predictions for 2020.”

Check out the webinar below to learn more about mobile commerce trends, predictions for 2020, and how in-app tracking in affiliate can help advertisers build stronger relationships with top-performing publishers.

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Rakuten Advertising

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