Google has developed a new tool which can be used to measure the number of sales in physical stores after people have clicked online advertisements. The gathered information is shared with advertisers. The new tool is called 'Store Sales Measurement'.
The measurements are performed by matching clicks on online advertisements of people who are logged into Google, with the collective purchases of those users on credit and debit cards. The company also uses another method which matches the email addresses of users who clicked on online ads with the email addresses collected by stores for loyalty programs.
The first method requires no extra work for the store, the latter requires sharing data with Google.
Users shouldn't worry about their privacy, the search engine stresses that it won't be able to see which specific items have been purchased, as Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google's Senior Vice President of Ads and Commerce explains, "both solutions match transactions back to Google ads in a secure and privacy-safe way and only report on aggregated and anonymized store sales to protect your customer data."
Because Google especially mentions it is only able to use the measurements on 70% of the U.S. credit card purchases, it's likely the store sales measurement tool is currently only available to stores in the United States. It's unknown which stores currently use the technology.
