Survey of Cross Device Matching Approaches with a Case Study on a Novel Database

Due to the convergence of digital marketing and advertising efforts with variety of digital devices like tablets, smart-phones, PCs, smart TVs and even wearable devices, tracking the relations among these devices has become a key component for personalised targeting of their users. In other words, as online tracking is evolving from device tracking to people tracking, providing user-centric experience on the online domains is getting prevalent for product recommendations and online advertising. Although some cross device tracking services have been provided in recent years and some global competitions have been held by using dataset comprised of anonymous users' device statistics and online behavioural patterns, very few attempts have been put forward in order to compare these efforts comprehensively. This study is putting out a survey for investigating latest researches related with cross-device targeting, and proposes a new probabilistic cross device matching approach along with a new dataset which can be used as a benchmark for future studies.