Facebook, Criteo, Adwords, Ematics, Dynamic Yield and many more. You might know well at least one of those companies with whom we work. Those companies can provide us great tools and data because we are sharing with them valuable data: our tracking data. That’s where marketing pixels come in!

Marketing/Advertising pixels are small snippets placed on the website to collect information about the visitor and his online behaviour. From this data, you can set up your goals, evaluate your conversions and so on. It seems so easy, it’s almost black magic, isn’t it? And the magic works in the web browser … but a mobile application doesn’t work with a web browser, right? … This is from where our problems start!!

The ultimate guide to integrate one “pixel” in a mobile application

  1. Ask your mobile developers (Android and iOS as it’s better to do the work twice) to integrate the vendor SDK - Software Development Kit
  2. Ask them to send the correct data to the vendor
  3. Test if everything works well for both platforms - I pass the painful testing details
  4. Send your new app version to the App Store/Play Store
  5. Wait for Apple/Google validation
  6. Your “pixel” is live!!!!!!

30 pixels later: your mobile developers are tired, you’re tired, and on top of that, your application takes about 10 minutes to start – 30 SDK are becoming heavy for a mobile application …

Should we give up? Of course not

That’s why Octopus went to the mobile tracking war! Octopus acts as a third part, it ensures the communication between our mobile apps and everything else.

  • Data Consolidation - 1 code for 2 mobile apps
  • Less app-dependant - Any changes can go live without waiting for app releases
  • Completely customisable - We can integrate/format/send all the pixels we want (included Google Analytics events)
  • Data Enrichment — We can enrich the data before dispatching them - Cheetah integration

Built to be simple and efficient

Octopus’s infrastructure is based on 2 main pieces:

  • the Firebase SDK integrated within the apps - To collect the events.
  • Firebase Cloud Functions - Serverless environment to process and send the data

This infrastracture is highly scalable and doesn’t require server maintenance from our side.

  • Anaïs Ghelfi