How cross-device tracking helps drive growth for your business

What is cross-device tracking and how does it work?

Cross-device tracking uses sophisticated attribution technology to track individual user’s journeys across multiple devices.

By connecting data from different devices with the help of identifiers (such as unique device IDs, cookies, or login information) you can establish a unique user identification, measure a user’s behavior, and tailor your customer experience to the user and the device they’re using.

For example, a smartphone user might see an advert for a product on Instagram while they’re out and about. They then Google that product (still on smartphone) without investigating further. Later on, they use their laptop internet browser to find out more about the product and purchase it.

Cross-device tracking links all these actions together, identifying them as belonging to the same user.

And once your business knows this, you can start asking questions like:

• How and where are users switching devices?

• Which activities do they do on mobile vs. web?

• How many browsing sessions typically lead to conversion?

• What are the main paths users take to conversion?

• Where are users dropping off, and how can we improve engagement?

• What behavioral trends should we focus on?

• Which devices and touchpoints contribute most to conversions?

What are some cross-device tracking methods?

First of all: forget about cookies. Thanks to evolving privacy regulations and changes in browser policies (such as Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) and Chrome’s phasing out of third-party cookies), traditional cookie-based tracking is becoming less effective.

With cookies crumbling fast, businesses instead need to rely on a combination of different cross-device tracking methods to get a comprehensive view of user journeys. 

Deterministic cross-device tracking

Deterministic tracking uses unique identifiers to link devices, which usually means logins. 

For example, you might log into a streaming app on your smartphone, then later that day log into it via your smart TV.  Deterministic tracking will link those logins and identify you as the same user.

Strengths and weaknesses

Probabilistic cross-device tracking

Probabilistic tracking looks for patterns in anonymized data to make an educated guess about if it’s the same person using different devices.

Data points probabilistic tracking might use include: 

• Device type, such as smartphone, tablet, computer, smart device

• Browser type and version

• Operating system, such as iOS or Android

• IP address

• Location data, city or region

• Time of activity, when the device is used

• Browsing behavior, such as visited websites or actions taken

Strengths and weaknesses

 A hybrid approach to cross-device tracking

Since both deterministic and probabilistic tracking have strengths and weaknesses, it’s advisable to rely on a hybrid approach that uses both. This combination of cross-device tracking methods is exactly what Heap by Contentsquare provides.

Cross-device tracking vs. cross-platform tracking: what’s the difference?

These terms are often used interchangeably, but there is a difference. 

While cross-device tracking follows users across different pieces of hardware, cross-platform tracking follows user interactions across different types of software.

To use an example, smartphone users might browse your company’s website and use your company’s app. Cross-platform tracking will track users' in-browser and in-app behavior and tell you when they moved from one to the other—and cross-device tracking will follow them if they transfer from smartphone to a computer or tablet to carry on their journey.

With Heap by Contentsquare you get both cross-device and cross-platform tracking, which means you have complete visibility into your user journeys whatever device or platform they’re using. 

The use of data science in cross-device tracking

As in every other area of technology, data science algorithms are becoming increasingly important in cross-device tracking. 

Algorithms can analyze huge amounts of user behavior data at high speed to make predictive recommendations and decisions that you can then use to tailor your digital experiences.

For example, data science analysis might predict where customers are most likely to engage with content, analyzing previous interactions to serve the most effective ads on the most effective device—which will help maximize their chance of converting.

The benefits of cross-device tracking 

Fundamentally, cross-device tracking gives you a more complete view of your customer journeys and, therefore, of your customers. The more you know about your customers, the better equipped you are to meet their needs. 

Understanding how users are interacting with your product across a range of devices lets you create more personalized and targeted experiences and campaigns, which in turn will help you avoid wasted marketing spend and missed engagement opportunities.

Improved user experience

Having visibility into your multi-device journeys helps you improve the user experience in a multitude of ways, including 

• Smoother transitions: cross-device tracking lets you see where transitions between devices are causing friction and where to remove friction to create a more seamless experience

• Consistent messaging: by understanding your user journey, you can create a contextually relevant messaging flow—delivering messages at the right time and on the right device (this also helps make the journey seamless) 

• Getting rid of duplication: knowing which users are using multiple devices, and how far down the funnel they are, helps you avoid bombarding them with the same adverts repeatedly 

Accurately measure marketing attribution and smarter budget allocation

Cross-device tracking enables marketers to accurately credit which interactions on each device and channel influenced conversion.

This means you can improve return on investment (ROI) by allocating your budget more effectively, directing funds to the highest performing devices/channels. You’ll also be able to measure your customers true lifetime value (LTV).

More effective personalization and targeting

Cross-device tracking helps businesses serve the right content on the right device at the right time.

For example, when a user browses a product on mobile but completes the purchase on desktop, tracking this behavior enables customized retargeting.

Privacy-friendly tracking 

As third-party cookies are phased out, AI-driven cross-device tracking helps businesses maintain accurate insights while respecting privacy regulations.

Cross-device tracking use cases 

Cross-device tracking benefits businesses across various industries by enabling seamless multi-device user experiences, optimizing marketing efforts, and improving customer retention. 

Here are 5 key industries that can benefit from cross-device tracking, and 2 example use cases for each.

These industry-specific use cases showcase how cross-device tracking enhances customer experiences, improves attribution, and optimizes engagement.

eCommerce and Retail

1. Multi-device shopping behavior analysis

• Scenario: a customer browses products on mobile during the day but completes the purchase on a desktop at night. 

• Cross-device tracking links these interactions, allowing you to attribute the conversion accurately and personalize follow-ups.

2. Abandoned cart recovery across devices

• Scenario: a user adds an item to their cart on mobile but doesn’t complete the purchase.

• Cross device tracking enables them to later receive a personalized reminder on their desktop or app, prompting them to finalize the transaction.

Software as a Service (SaaS) and B2B software

1. Cross device free trial conversions

• Scenario: a potential customer signs up for a free trial on desktop but later accesses the product on their mobile device.

• Cross device tracking helps your sales teams identify this engaged user and optimize trial-to-paid conversion strategies.

2. Multi-device user engagement tracking

• Scenario: a team starts using a SaaS product on their work desktop but later collaborates on a mobile app.

• Cross device tracking lets your product teams understand how and where users switch devices so they can enhance the omnichannel experience.

Financial Services and Banking

1. Seamless account management

• Scenario: a user checks their account balance on mobile, then applies for a loan on a desktop website.

• Cross-device tracking ensures a smooth transition without requiring redundant logins or re-entering information.

2. Fraud detection and security monitoring

• Scenario: a customer logs into their banking app on multiple devices, from different locations, within a short period.

• Cross-device tracking can flag this sort of suspicious activity and trigger security measures.

Healthcare and Telemedicine

1. Unified patient portal access

• Scenario: a patient books an appointment on their desktop but later checks their lab results on mobile.

• Cross-device tracking ensures all interactions are logged in a single patient record for a seamless experience.

2. Remote consultation continuity

• Scenario: a patient starts a telehealth appointment on a laptop but moves to a phone due to connection issues.

• Cross-device tracking enables you to track session continuity, helping maintain a smooth virtual healthcare experience.

Travel and Hospitality

1. Multi-device trip planning and booking

• Scenario: a traveler searches for flights on their phone but completes the booking on a laptop.

• Cross-device tracking connects these interactions, enabling targeted promotions, such as seat upgrades or travel insurance.

2. Seamless hotel check-in experience

• Scenario: a guest books a hotel room on desktop but later checks in with a mobile app.

• Cross-device tracking ensures the reservation data is accessible across platforms, streamlining the check-in process.

Cross-device tracking solution must-haves

A best-in-class cross-device tracking solution needs to go beyond simple event tracking. 

It must seamlessly unify user interactions across multiple devices while ensuring accurate insights, actionable analytics, and privacy compliance.

Here’s a checklist of capabilities that your tracking solution should feature:

Introducing Heap by Contentsquares cross-device tracking 

Heap uses deterministic and probabilistic tracking to allow businesses to merge user identities across multiple sessions and platforms—ensuring extremely accurate multi-device analysis.  

What’s more, Heap enables cross-platform tracking, letting you track behavior across web browsers, mobile browsers and apps, and third-party tools.

Heap empowers businesses to:

• Automatically capture user behavior across devices without manual event setup

• Unify customer journeys using both deterministic (login-based) and probabilistic (pattern-based) tracking

• Gain deeper insights through session replays, heatmaps, and funnel analysis

• Optimize user experience by identifying friction points in multi-device interactions

• Enhance marketing attribution by accurately crediting conversions across touchpoints

• Ensure data privacy compliance with built-in GDPR, CCPA, and security tools

This enables businesses to improve engagement, increase conversions, and make data-driven decisions based on a holistic view of customer behavior across devices.

Now, let’s take a look at some of those capabilities in a little more detail. 

 Autocapture cross-platform data

With a single snippet of code (or SDK on mobile apps), Heap will autocapture every view, click, swipe, tap, scroll, and form fill on your desktop website and mobile website and app. It works on web, iOS, Android, and over a dozen third-party applications.

You can also use custom APIs to capture additional data about your user interactions and manage identities across sessions and devices.

And thanks to Heap’s data management features, it’s easy to keep data from all platforms consistent and flexible. You can combine cross-platform events with a click of a button, modify any event (even from the past), and resolve identities.

Plus, with Heap Connect, you can easily send behavioral data to your cloud data warehouse to blend it with other business intelligence (BI) data. Our managed extract, transform, load (ETL) process automatically integrates with Redshift, bigQuery, Snowflake, and S3. 

Access high-level insights with ease—and go deeper with experience analytics 

Everyone in your business can easily access behavioral insights with Heap’s customizable dashboards and charts. These charts are easily shared via link or email, empowering you to align teams around core metrics and insights. 

And if you need to dig deeper into your behavioral data, Heap makes that easy too.

Use Session Replay to watch sessions from the point of view of your users and uncover the ‘why’ behind their behavior. Or use Heatmaps to see, at a glance, what elements of your pages users are (or aren’t) engaging with.

Analyze and optimize your cross device journeys 

With Journeys, you can build visual maps of every path your users take through your product—regardless of whatever device (or devices) they’re using. 

You can easily see which journeys are working best, where friction is  causing drop offs (for example, in transitions between devices)—and then use Session Replay to understand why certain paths are, or aren’t, working.

Understand what’s driving conversion across multiple touchpoints

Heap lets you conduct funnel analysis to understand what’s driving and impeding conversion. 

You can build conversion funnels based on key steps that span devices and channels, such as:

1. Saw a product advertised on your mobile app

2. Explored the product on mobile web browser

3. Logged into your website on desktop browser 

4. Added product to cart on desktop browser 

Heap’s data science will tell you what actions users performed both at and in-between those steps, so you can determine precisely what’s encouraging them to move forward and what’s causing them to drop off. 

And because Heap tracks which devices and channels in a journey contribute to conversion, it enables multi-touch attribution, and provides accurate ROAS and LTV insights.

Get data-science insights and assistance

Given the sheer complexity of the cross-device and cross-platform journey, your team’s going to need some data science assistance to benefit from insights. 

Heap Illuminate adds a data science layer to the Heap platform, and it’s got you covered. It automatically surfaces key insights from your journeys to help you optimize every journey across any device.

Privacy as a policy

With Heap, you can easily configure data collection settings with no-code privacy controls to ensure your cross-device tracking doesn’t fall out of compliance.

Heap supports compliance with state and international data privacy regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA, while meeting stringent internal protection requirements. And because the platform doesn’t rely on third-party cookies, it’s futureproof.

Heap’s suite of privacy and security tools (including Managed SCIM and Audit Logs work for global enterprises and single person start-ups) are designed to be usable without writing a single line of code. 

And because you shouldn’t have to pay extra for standard privacy and security, all Heap customers have access to single sign-on (SSO).

How to get started with Heap’s cross-device tracking in 6 easy steps

Cross-device tracking is easy with Heap. To get started, follow these simple steps.

1. Install Heap across all platforms

• Web integration: follow the Web installation guide to add the Heap JavaScript snippet to your website.

• Mobile integration: use the iOS and Android quickstart guides to incorporate Heap's SDKs into your mobile applications.

• Cross-platform frameworks: refer to the React Native, Flutter, and Xamarin quickstart guides for applications built with these frameworks.

2. Identify users consistently

Implement the heap.identify() API as detailed in the Track user identity guide to assign unique identifiers to users across devices.

3. Utilize automatic data capture and custom events

Heap's autocapture feature records user interactions without manual configuration. For specific events, implement the heap.track() API as described in the Manually track events documentation.

4. Implement cross-domain tracking (if applicable)

Configure cross-domain tracking to maintain unified user profiles across multiple domains. Detailed steps are available in the Track user identity guide.

5. Ensure privacy compliance

Adhere to data protection regulations by implementing user consent mechanisms and data anonymization. Refer to the Data Privacy section on the Heap Help Center for comprehensive guidelines.

6. Validate and test the implementation:

After setup, test the tracking to ensure data accuracy. This Best practices for cross-platform analysis article provides insights into verifying session unification and event tracking across devices.

By following the resources in the above steps, you can successfully set up Heap's cross-device tracking to gain a comprehensive understanding of user behavior across platforms.

Start your cross-device tracking journey today

If you want to learn more about how Heap can help you track and optimize your user journeys across every device and channel, sign up for a free trial today.

About Heap by Contentsquare

Heap by Contentsquare is a leader in Product Analytics. Heap's low-code, easy-to-use digital analytics software illuminates key digital behaviors and pinpoints valuable quantitative and qualitative insights so teams can quickly act with confidence and create the best possible digital experiences. Over 1000 businesses trust Heap to increase revenue, improve conversion, accelerate decision-making, and drive business impact at scale. Heap is backed by leading tech investors, including Menlo Ventures, NewView Capital, Goldman Sachs Asset Management and DCP, among others. For more information, visit https://www.heap.io/