Google already monitors your online shopping, but now it also going to keep an eye on what you’re buying in real-world stores as part of its latest effort to sell more digital advertising.
It will scan your offline transactions mostly done through credit and debit card to help Google automatically share data with merchants so that their digital ads translate into sales at a brick-and-mortar store. Google believes the data will show a cause-and-effect relationship between online ads and offline sales. If it works, that could help motivate merchants to increase their digital marketing budgets.
GOOGLE WINDFALL
The company is already being running the world’s biggest online ad network, and generated $79 billion revenue last year. That puts it in the best position to grab any additional marketing dollars spent on computers and mobile devices. Google also have plans to launch the store-sales measurement tool.
Google is also launching numerous of other features that are designed to help merchants to drive more traffic to their physical stores and to gain a better understanding on how digital ads appearing across a variety of devices are affecting their sales.
SMARTER AD TRACKING
Most of the new analytics twists draw upon Google’s inroads in “machine learning” - a way of “training” computers to behave more like humans _ to interpret the data. The search engine interface and Chrome web browser of Google are a good source of data about people’s interests and online activities that it can feed into machine-learning systems.
In the case of the store sales measure tool, Google’s computers are trying to analyze about what people look at after clicking on an online ad and then what they buy using their credit and debit cards.
Let’s take an example, when someone is searching for a pair of running shorts online, clicked on an ad displayed from sporting goods store but didn’t buy anything, the advertiser might conclude initially that they had wasted money for ad. But Google says its new tool will now be able to tell if the same person bought the shoes a few days later at one of the advertiser’s brick-and-mortar stores.
DIGITAL DOSSIERS
Google says it has access to roughly 70 percent of US credit and debit card transactions through partnerships with other companies that track that data. That means Google is still unable to provide evidence for every purchase made using plastic, and it is lacking to find a way of knowing when people buy something with cash.
Google gives its users the option to limit the company’s tracking and control what types of ads they are shown.
The users worry about losing their privacy for the digital documents that Google has compiled on the more than one billion people who use its search engine and other services, which includes Gmail, YouTube and Android. Google allows its users to limit the company’s tracking and control what types of ads they are shown.
According to Google, its computers can store identifying data triggered by online clicks and match it with other identifying information compiled by merchants and the issuers of credit and debit cards to figure out when a digital ad contributes to an offline purchase.
As per Google, Shoppers identity isn’t disclosed, means they aren’t identified by their names. And the company noted that it doesn’t share any of its anonymized information with its advertisers; but, it targets ads at individuals who fit demographic profiles sought by advertisers.
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