• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 8, 2015

IgnitionOne began rolling out Thursday what will become a series of features aimed at improving cross-device campaigns. The first provides insight into the influence that mobile advertisements have on desktop conversions. The reporting will give marketers more accurate information on return on investments to reinvest more wisely.

MobileAssist, the first in a series, identifies where mobile advertising pays a part in previously unattributed conversions. The analysis tool, part of IgnitionOne's marketing suite and based on the technology acquired from Human Demand, examines unattributed conversions and connects them to users who have been influenced by mobile ads to determine the best place to invest budgets.

Marketers can expect nearly 1.91 billion smartphone users worldwide in 2015, rising to nearly 2.16 billion in 2016, eMarketer estimates. Inexpensive smartphones continue to open new opportunities for marketing and commerce in emerging markets where many consumers previously had no access to the Internet. In mature markets, consumers are quickly adapting to using smartphones on a daily basis. In fact, many are using multiple devices each day.

Consumers are moving from device to device, yet marketers investing in advertising on mobile devices do so without having a clear picture of what effect these ads have. Integration of desktop and mobile in the platform offers a complete view of how budgets play out across devices, such as when someone sees an ad on a mobile device, but makes a purchase on their desktop. "Marketers can see when they turn off mobile campaigns their desktop conversions begin to drop," said Roger Barnette, president at IgnitionOne. "

More often, marketers don't invest enough in a campaign out of fear of not knowing the results. Following IgnitionOne's acquisition of Demand Side Platform (DSP) Human Demand, the company begun putting together the pieces to show how mobile advertisements can assist in desktop conversions.

Advertisers often see reports that identify desktop conversions. In this example, the brand tracked 16,441 conversions on desktop, tying the results back to its media spend. IgnitionOne identified another 1,499 conversions of the 6,248 unattributed conversions found by using MobileAssist that went back to the desktop.

MobileAssist produced a 9.12% lift in incremental orders and $44,982.70 in incremental revenue with 2.1 times the mobile ROI.

"Mobile is vastly under attributed by the nature of third-party cookie limitations on mobile devices," Barnette said. "This is a way to show more accurate -- and in many cases, higher -- ROI on advertising spend."