Google Tracks Brick and Mortar Transactions

A large portion of advertising dollars is now spent online by companies and they two sites that get the most advertisers are Facebook and Google.  Advertising being so much of their revenue Google has put a tone of research in how to prove the value for advertising with them.  With data we can track how many clicks an ad gets, how many impressions, or how many online conversions it gets, however, they have not been able to tell, concretely, how seeing an online advertisement has influenced consumers to make purchases in brick and mortar stores.  Until now, that is.

Google announced that it will begin using data from billions of debit and credit card transactions to prove that digital advertising works.  This data includes credit card numbers, transaction amounts, and time stamps of the purchase.  Google says it is taking steps to protect the consumer identity by creating mathematical formulas that turn the consumers name into a random string of numbers.  These formulas make it so that it is impossible for Google to know the identity of real-world shoppers and for the retailers to know the identity of Google users, they will only know that a match was made.  This once again raises the serious issue of privacy that many consumers have.