MOUNTAINVIEW, Calif.—Google has announced plans to track debit and credit card sales to determine whether online ads are leading to offline sales.
The new service, Google Attribution, will help advertisers see whether their online advertising campaigns are working, reported LowCards.com.
“Google Attribution will capture 70% of payment card transactions in the United States. Advertisers will be able to use this information to see which keywords and clicks have an impact on whether someone makes a purchase,” said LowCards.com CEO Bill Hardekopf.
"For the first time, Google Attribution makes it possible for every marketer to measure the impact of their marketing across devices and cross-channel - all in one place," the company said on its website.
“The company promised this information will be stored and transmitted in a ‘secure and privacy-safe way, and only report on aggregated and anonymized store sales to protect your customer data.’ Google said they will use ‘double-blind encryption,’ which means retailers will only know that someone came to their store—not the person's identity,” Hardekopf explained.
This new technology builds on the analytics tools that Google first launched in 2014. The company already has massive amounts of information on anyone who uses the search engine, which it collects via AdWords, Google Analytics and DoubleClick Search. It can also grab location information from mobile devices via Google Maps and other apps, which is how the company can tell whether a user has seen a particular ad and if they subsequently purchased the product offline, Hardekopf explained.
"In under three years, advertisers globally have measured over five billion store visits," Google said