Today’s leading marketers have revamped their customer behavior measurement techniques to more accurately understand how mobile activity fits into the sales funnel, as research compiled by Google, Econsultancy and Bain & Company demonstrated. Marketers who were labeled as leaders in their field were 75 percent more likely than others to have moved to a more holistic measurement model in the past two years and 83 percent more likely than their peers to include cross-device data in their modeling.

Mobile marketing drives spending

Walgreens and Macy’s are two key examples of retailers whose marketing efforts on mobile devices are translating into quantifiable success. Customers of the pharmacy chain who use the Walgreens app spend six times more than customers who do not, while Macy’s customers who used used multiple channels (e.g., browse on a mobile device, then complete a purchase on a desktop computer) spent eight times more than their single-channel counterparts.

A quick mobile search may prompt consumers to visit a local outlet, make their originally intended purchases and maybe toss some impulse items into their carts. How are marketers evaluating the success of this outreach? After all, this makes up a significant portion of the population — the report determined “76 percent of people who search on their smartphone for something nearby visit a related business within a day, and 28 percent of those searches result in a purchase.”

Bridging the gaps

Successful marketers are using creative methods to calculate these types of returns. Researchers found that leading marketers are 71 percent more likely than “mainstream” professionals to regularly use estimates to bridge these gaps between direct measurement and analytics. The vast majority of respondents (95 percent) agreed with the statement, “To truly matter, marketing analytics KPIs must be tied to broader business goals.”

The increased focus on mobile marketing metrics followed a shift in consumers’ usage habits, as more than two-thirds of smartphone owners will turn to these devices first “in a moment of need.”

Companies are “bringing into mobile the expectations, practices, rules and measurements they use in other forms of online advertising,” Bain & Company explained. “But mobile, once seen as a subset of digital, should now be considered its own medium, one with enormous possibilities and new rules of engagement.” With 2.5 billion smartphones in use worldwide, marketers must continue to quantify mobile’s influence in their strategies and performance tracking.

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