As digitalization increases, retail firms must invest in online and mobile commerce to attract customers to their website or mobile store. Since the type of device used to access marketing channels influences conversions, this research examines the different impacts of different devices such as desktop computers, tablets, and smartphones on the success of various marketing channels. We find customer experience (CX) to be important in improving attribution outcomes (e.g., conversion rates) by combining clickstream and survey data to understand consumers’ decision processes. Therefore, this paper also conceptualizes and measures perceptions of CX of clickstream-data participants. We identify the central implications of using each device.

Introduction

Due to rapid evolutions in technology, interactions between customers and retail firms have fundamentally changed (Grewal et al., 2017). Customer nowadays have evolving expectations of retailers because of reduced information asymmetries, past experiences, higher levels of customer orientation, or the multiplication of media outlets (e.g., Kumar, 2018). Retailers are interested in how customer behavior is changing as a result of the adoption of different devices for shopping purposes in both the online and mobile contexts (Kannan and Li, 2017; Souiden et al., 2018). Whereas the online context is mainly represented by desktop computers, customers increasingly use smartphones and tablets as primary devices for shopping in the mobile context (Criteo, 2018). Thus, retail firms are challenged by high levels of diversity and complexity in customer journey configurations across different devices used by customers (Harris et al., 2018). As a consequence, both scholars and practitioners are shifting their primary focus to the allocation of investments to attract customers to online or mobile stores, respectively (e.g., Marketing Science Institute, 2016; 2018). Since the effect of marketing channels (e.g., display advertising) on conversions is expected to differ across different devices, research has been encouraged to include tablets and smartphones in attribution modeling (Kannan and Li, 2017; Lemon and Verhoef, 2016; Souiden et al., 2018). Thus, the first objective of this research is to understand the effectiveness of various marketing channels across desktop, tablet, and smartphone devices in enhancing retailers’ performance of marketing channel budget allocation. Against this background, user-specific clickstream data was collected from a retailer that runs both an online and a mobile store. The paper implements an existing attribution model (Anderl et al., 2016) that tracks customer behavior at device level.