If i say ad tracking in mobile is same as it is done in online world , it won’t be true completely as the tracking in mobile differs and is complex than tracking in PC . There is no doubt tracking in mobile played the good role for the good pace of advertising in mobile world with time. Everything was at place and was moving smooth with daily new technologies , But then Apple came out with it’s new security measure and started rejecting new iOS apps that access unique device identifiers (UDID), leading to developer concern – and potential upside for ad tracking firms too.
UDID stands for “unique device identifier” and it is a string of bits derived from several hardware components on the iPhone (Bluetooth radio, WiFi radio and some others). As the name implies, it is tied to a specific individual iPhone and cannot be changed. For several years, it has been used by mobile advertisers and ad networks to count how often users install apps when they view and click on advertisements promoting those applications. This is known as the “conversion rate” of a particular ad. It is the most important performance metric used by advertisers to compute how cost-effectively they can acquire new users.The UDID is used as the key piece of information tying the two events together. The app that generates the click and the app that are installed send a hashed version of the UDID to a central third party. A conversion is recorded when these events can be attributed to the same UDID within a certain time period.
But due to security measure Apple made the users happy and secured but at the same time developers , ad networks got disappointed and started to work on for the replacement of using UDID tracking technology which is a big thing as the UDID is the critical link in matching a click and a downstream conversion and is a 100% correct data.
After than number of alternatives came out for tracking in mobile world as accurate tracking is most important here .
- By gathering several pieces of anonymous data about a user at the time of an ad click, you can achieve a high degree of accuracy in attributing a mobile app conversion back to that user when they eventually install an app on their iPhone (or Android device).
- Using HTML5 cookie : An alternative approach is to pass a user through the Mobile Safari browser both after she clicks on an ad and after she launches an app for the first time.It’s really similar to what we’ve been doing over the past so many years on the web. But the user experience is negative towards it as user needs to open a web browser every time they install an app.
- Device fingerprinting : Nowadays you must have heard a lot about fingerprinting technology as it is giving quite accurate data . It’s a way of generating an ID number from a number of characteristics about a user, like what kind of mobile browser they have, the device they’re using or their location. The best part of this method is it probably won’t get rejected as it’s outside of Apple’s control but it do carries the risk of duplication’s.
- Using Wi-fi MAC address : A device’s (whether they’re smartphones or laptops) Mac address is tied to its physical networking hardware and is used in Wi-Fi communications to uniquely identify a device that is sending or receiving data .It’s definitely unique to every single device, just like the UDID. So it would be an easy one-to-one replacement.
You must have realized that we do have differences in tracking in both mobile and PC .