Cross-device recognition is often the difference between a sale and a fail for Land of Nod, a national retailer of high-end, trendy children’s furniture, bedding and toys.
“The question I always ask my team is, ‘Would we really want to show a bunk bed to a new mom?’” said Joe Orlando, Land of Nod’s marketing director. “Cross-device is critically important to us.”
It’s up to Land of Nod to meticulously keep track of consumers throughout two life cycles: parents and, by extension, their kids. A new mom who’s showed interest in a crib or purchased a bassinet on the Land of Nod website will likely be interested in toddler items within the next year to 18 months.
“It’s important for us to keep an eye out for signals as customers traverse those life cycle stages,” Orlando said. “But without the proper identification and the proper profiling, we wouldn’t be able to deliver the correct message. We’d end up creating a lot of irrelevant communications which would drag down the overall performance.”
Land of Nod has been working with Conversant to maintain consistent communications with its consumers across devices and prove out the centrality of mobile in the customer journey.
The majority of its sales still happen on desktop – people don’t generally buy big-ticket items like furniture on their phones – but mobile is a primary touchstone.
“Without any insight into how customers are moving from one device to another, usually from mobile to desktop, we had to take a leap of faith,” Orlando said. “We knew we had to be present on mobile because we felt our customers were there, [but] now we’re able to see a lot of research, consideration and discovery happening in the mobile arena.
“We don’t want to miss out on the early stages of consideration just because there’s not a direct conversion on the mobile device.”
Land of Nod customers are generally high-income individuals and primarily use Apple products, spending most of their time in iOS apps and using Safari browsers, which makes tracking tricky because Safari automatically rejects third-party tracking cookies.
Conversant’s matching technology uses transactional data from around 4,000 retailers and the behavior data it collects itself to create individual profiles across devices and channels. After anonymizing the data, Conversant matches users against its existing list of verified, anonymized IDs.
“And then we have a broad network of publishers and exchanges we work with from an advertising standpoint that alert us when they see any of our unique IDs and we determine amongst all of our clients which ads that person is qualified for based on the business rules we set up with the client,” said Michael Comins, client development director at Conversant.
In an industry plagued by low match rates and ambiguity, Conversant claims a 94% match rate for Land of Nod customers across devices. Conversant combines an average of 14 diffuse cookies and devices into each profile it creates for the brand and sees 89% of the users identified as Land of Nod customers return within 90 days. A recent Land of Nod campaign was able to capitalize on that information to serve around 1,500 different creative iterations per month.
Rather than focusing on particular publishers, Land of Nod is focused on the user, Orlando said.
“We’re not super homed into specific sites,” he said. “Wherever those users and profiles are interacting is where we want to be, and we rely on [our partners] to ensure that they’re serving on quality sites that are up to our standards.”
As far as mobile is concerned, Comins said that Conversant sees quite a lot of Land of Nod’s messaging reaching people on their phones, despite the actual purchase happening on desktop at a later point.
“On mobile, we always try to be cognizant of what a user is doing at any given point, not just always trying to drive back to a conversion,” Orlando said. “You’re not going to see the same results on mobile as desktop unless you change your thinking and the metrics you’re looking at to determine success.”
Part of the reason why Land of Nod has seen such positive results with its cross-device program is because of its willingness to “open up and share their data with us,” Comins said.
“Privacy is crucially important, of course, and we take it very seriously,” Comins said. “But we’ve had clients who want to hold their data very close to the vest and then they don’t see the same fruits.”
