• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, August 19, 2014

One of the aspirations of digital marketers and publishers is to be able to follow a customer as they move from device to desktop and back, allowing users to pick up where they left off. To that end, Megan Hughes, director of product, mobile, at Orbitz Worldwide, said the company has recently begun syncing recent user searches across its properties on different devices—desktop, apps and mobile and tablet Web—to suit to the longer travel purchase cycle. “So if you’re doing a search home on your iPad, you get to work the next day, you go on to the Orbitz desktop site, and you’ll see the searches you did the previous night,” she told the Mobile Insider Summit audience.

 Oribitz also pulls in a dynamic background image of the last site someone searched, “just to carry that inspiration throughout the booking process.” At the same time, she noted that tracking cross-device behavior and attribution remains a challenge.