• by Ben Frederick  @mp_benfred, October 20, 2015

Ad tech company AdTheorent announced today that it will incorporate data from research firm IHS Automotive into a cross-channel attribution solution linking mobile and desktop advertising to vehicle purchase.

The partnership allows automotive advertisers to use Total Market Predictor data from IHS to target audiences at scale across devices.

AdTheorent’s mobile and desktop impression IDs are matched with IHS purchase data to help identify impressions that influenced physical purchases of vehicles. The various deterministic IDs that consumers have are combined into one ID; consumers can then be targeted more accurately across channels.

According to an Automotive Buyer Influence Study run jointly by IHS and AutoTrader.com, 42% of recent car buyers use multiple devices along their path to purchase.

Forrester reports that only 13% of marketers feel very confident measuring cross-channel, while 18% are very confident in their ability to measure mobile ROI. According to a separate Forrester study, poor data integration is the biggest bugbear of marketers making cross-channel efforts.

Only 27% have unified measurement capabilities to understand the complete experience across channels and devices. Less than 30% track customers across touchpoints using cookies. However, those companies that report higher revenues are more likely to have executed a cross-channel campaign.

Cross-channel and omnichannel are increasingly becoming the means by which customers interact with retailers and brands, though some analysts predict those buzzwords will fall by the wayside once there isn't a significant group of consumers that shop only through one channel.