Shopping Privacy: Digital Marketing Tools Joins Reality

To this day, most digital marketers gave 100% credit for an online sale to the last advertisement that led to the sale. It is nice and simple to understand.

But Google is trying to measure ads more accurately. For many purchases, there are multiple points where the consumer are reached before the sales have been made, whether that be in the form of ads on various sites, ads from searches, video ads, and referrals. Google is trying to use machine learning on their large datasets to measure the efficiency of the various types of ads across different platforms/devices and possibly credit the advertisements more appropriately.

For most of marketing history, digital ads have been separated from the physical world. For the most part, promotional codes from coupons/marketing emails have linked the digital and physical worlds.

Recently Google said that they have information about 70% of all credit and debit card transactions in the US (through partnerships); I'm sure this percentage will growth significantly in the near future. This will change how digital marketers see the effectiveness of their digital ads. They can possibly link whether their digital ads lead to in-store purchases without any promotional codes. With the data Google has, they could do this with user location data and/or confirm a purchase through credit card transaction information.

It doesn't have to stop there though. It can work both directions. Physical marketing can lead to digital sales. It would be good to see whether certain brick and mortar stores, promotional events, or even billboards lead to online sales. Your physical location can lead to more targeted digital searches. For example, if I'm at a tennis court multiple times a week, I may see more tennis merchandise ads even if I didn't search anything tennis related.

Google could know information like if you're in a store, you research the price at other stores, and then if you decide to buy it through another store (or at the one you are at). Will they expose this information to other companies? Probably not, but they could use that behavior in their business (e.g. ads for certain searches, like "tennis racquet", can cost much more if Google knows I'm at a tennis store).

While most of my readers are probably not marketers, I feel it is important to understand how your data is used so you have more control of your privacy. Digital marketing will continue to meld with marketing in the real world.

To change your privacy settings for ads, you go to Google->My Account->Ads Settings->Manage Ad Settings->Turn off "Ads Personalization"