This year, as usual, Google held a marketing conference where several new tools were announced to advertisers. One of them allows you to receive information about the offline purchases of Android Pay users. In this way, companies can monitor the effectiveness of advertising for their products/services, gaining information on the dynamics of purchases by various users. This is important for companies because marketing costs money, often a lot of money. Representatives of various companies want to optimize their costs, and the offline sector was previously difficult to track.
Now a company can assess, for example, the real "exhaust" from advertising on television, billboards, radio, etc. Normally, determining the effectiveness of such methods is also possible, but they are all very inaccurate. In the digital age, marketers have the ability to conduct advertising campaigns online, and everything here is subject to analysis. However, in the real, not virtual, world, until recently, everything was the same. But now Google allows to correct this oversight and give companies the ability to analyze sales and customer behavior, albeit only for the portion that uses Android Pay.
Now the advertiser can understand that yes, Piotr Nowak saw the cafe ad that was advertised yesterday and yes, he liked the coffee with a special form of cane sugar, for which he paid using the Google payments system. Great, now you can please the cafe owner with good news.
In fact, offline analytics is not the first experience for Google. Back in 2014, the company introduced a new tool that allows you to track the number of visitors with Android smartphones in the stores of a company that advertises something, combining the dynamics of visits with the performance of displayed ads. Attendance at individual locations is certainly good, but determining the average bill value or even fixing the fact of a purchase in this way is impossible. Therefore, a new tool was needed that would allow us to collect the missing data for a specific method. And that tool was Android Pay.
"Over the next few months, we will provide the ability to track in-store purchases at the campaign level. This will allow you to measure the store's revenue in addition to tracking its presence,"
said in Google's speech. In practice, this means the ability to track purchases back to a customer who has previously viewed an ad for a product purchased for them.
Google can now track 70% of credit and debit card purchases in the United States. The company's tools allow advertisers to track the dynamics of individual users' purchasing interests and "purchasing" behavior. Of course, the person's name and surname will not be provided in this case; Google has separately stated about data anonymization. But each buyer will be assigned an identification number like 08a862b091c379fe9767615d10873. According to this code, it will be possible to recognize that this person viewed several advertising videos for a store and in the afternoon bought the advertised goods in that store.
Can this be called anonymity? Probably yes. But the line between anonymity and de-anonymization of customers is very thin. Previous studies have already shown that identifying a user for credit card transactions is simple - .. Moreover, users can be identified by the apps they use.
And no one can guarantee that at some point the data with user identifiers won't "leak" onto the network. Further identifying a specific person will be very simple. And if you remember that in stores, buyers often ask for their email address (in this case, Google will track the purchase itself), the task becomes even simpler. And all of this is linked not only to Android Pay, but also to the user's credit card. This means that it is a huge database for each client that is stored "somewhere out there" and no one knows what they do with this data.
RSS Feed