INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
According to a report from Bloomberg, Google and Mastercard have signed a secret deal so that Google could track retail sales using
Mastercard transaction data
This is yet another proof that Google true customers are its advertising partners.
Online advertising have now overtaken all other
Companies spend more on online ads than TV ads, newspaper ads and more.
And the reason why online ads have become so popular is that it much
easier to track the effectiveness of your ad campaign
If you spend money on Google or Facebook ads, you can directly track the number of customers who end up on your online store because of your
You can even see what they end up buying.
And yet, what if you see an online ad for a TV and then you buy a TV in store Tech companies have
tried for years to bridge the gap between online ads and offline sales
That why Google tracks your location all the time, even if you turn off location history
And that also why Google and Mastercard may have signed a deal.
According to Bloomberg, all Mastercard transaction data in the United States
is encrypted and transmitted to Google
Google is paying Mastercard, and potentially other card networks, to access this information.
Google can''t see individual transactions
But the company can extract relevant information from this pile of data
For instance, it could match offline purchases with user profiles
And the company knows if a user clicked on an ad.
Advertisers can upload an email database to match up offline sales with Google profiles
Google sends them reports with total offline sales
Advertisers then see how much money they generated thanks to their online ad campaign.
It a good way to convince advertising clients that
their campaign was effective
When those companies are thinking about their advertising budget, chances are they will end up spending more money on Google if they see
that it leads to a lot sales.
This strategy shows once again that building an advertising business at scale requires some privacy
It even more offensive that Google doesn''t talk about these deals more publicly
Users deserve to know what happens.
You can reportedly opt out of this Mastercard deal by turning off &Web and App Activity& in your Google
But this setting is hard to find and encompasses a ton of stuff
Offline purchases are neither &web& nor &app& data for instance.
