Google Attribution: Making Advertisers happy one Ad at a time

[WMGroomAK]

In a 'How can this possibly go wrong?' kind of way, Google at their annual Marketing Next conference has announced their new Google Attribution system to help advertisers figure out if their marketing is truly working.  Basically Google will be using a combination of machine learning on data that it has collected and data from 'third-party partnerships, which capture approximately 70% of credit and debit card transactions in the United States' to model whether an ad is truly getting you to do out and buy a product.

 

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/google-will-track-your-offline-credit-card-payments-to-make-advertisers-happy/

Quote

At the annual Google Marketing Next conference, the Mountain View search and advertising giant announced a new service that will let advertisers track and tie offline credit card payments with ongoing marketing campaigns.

 

Google says this new system is driven by machine learning and combines data from Google's regular advertising campaigns with "third-party partnerships, which capture approximately 70% of credit and debit card transactions in the United States."

 

Google says this new system, announced yesterday and named Google Attribution, will answer the age-old question that every advertiser has posed: "How many product sales did my ads generate?"

 

Google can do this because of the amount of data it has on almost all Internet users. For example, Google Attribution will aggregate details from services such as AdWords, Google Analytics, and DoubleClick Search, which unify details about the ads displayed on your phone, the sites (and time) you visited, and what you've searched in Google.

 

Furthermore, Google has been collecting and using geolocation and WiFi network information from your phone to power its ads business since 2014.

 

Putting all this info together allows Google to tell when you've seen an ad, if you searched for the advertised product, and if you've gone to the mall or walked into a store that sells that product.

With the integration of payment data from "third-party partnerships," Google will know if you've bought that product and will report this in the advertiser's AdWords dashboard.

 

Google pointed out that all info on payment card transactions is reported back to "Google ads in a secure and privacy-safe way," the company only receiving aggregated and anonymized store sales, enough to identify a payment, but not the person who made it.

Seems like Google may be really bending that whole 'Don't Be Evil' thing on this one here.  I know that all of this data will be collected no matter what I do (unless I destroy my computer, withdraw all the money from the bank and work in cash only), but aggregating this data to target ads better is kind of a creepy move, especially considering how some fourth party may want to collect this processed (or non-processed) data for their own purposes...  

[Spenser1337]

Oh google 

[Billy_Mays]

Google sucks

[Zodiark1593]

Advertiser: This person sees are advertisements, but our data shows she is not buying anything we're advertising, what's going wrong.

 

Me: *tunnel vision on the content I seek*

[Crossbred]

They are a data company, they're gonna do what they gotta do.

[leadeater]

7 hours ago, WMGroomAK said:

Seems like Google may be really bending that whole 'Don't Be Evil' thing on this one here.  I know that all of this data will be collected no matter what I do (unless I destroy my computer, withdraw all the money from the bank and work in cash only), but aggregating this data to target ads better is kind of a creepy move, especially considering how some fourth party may want to collect this processed (or non-processed) data for their own purposes...  

True but as an advertiser it would great to know if you are spending your money wisely and effectively. We shouldn't fundamentally deny them the ability to do that and being able to tie an ad directly to a purchase is an advertisers dream, this is something that isn't really possible in any way right now.

 

The who, how and the what are the really big issues with this. As you said creepy, really creepy and certainly warrants us going "wait, what are you doing?!".

[SpaceGhostC2C]

11 hours ago, leadeater said:

True but as an advertiser it would great to know if you are spending your money wisely and effectively.

Although I don't know if Google should be doing it: I sense an ad bubble bursting...

 

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We shouldn't fundamentally deny them the ability to do that and being able to tie an ad directly to a purchase is an advertisers dream, this is something that isn't really possible in any way right now.

They will need more than this to achieve that goal, though. Essentially, you need not just good data on what happened, but also a credible counterfactual to compare against. It would be possible to construct one if ad serving was randomized along a number of dimensions, but Google's (and Facebook's, etc) business is based on targeting, precisely on the opposite of randomizing. 

Hence, buzzwords aside, I wonder if Google can really deliver on its promise. But maybe it will be enough to fool advertisers

 

Edited May 25, 2017 by SpaceGhostC2C
word predictor nightmare fixed

[Doobeedoo]

Future, everyone having AR HMD all the time, adds everywhere, need addblock for RL

[WMGroomAK]

1 hour ago, Doobeedoo said:

Future, everyone having AR HMD all the time, adds everywhere, need addblock for RL

Except for the fact that consumers abhor intrusive ads, I'm fairly sure with Google's AR products in the future for navigating stores, we'll be seeing ads everywhere and it'll probably try to route you to things it thinks you might want...  Stores in general will probably also re-arrange their products just to help implement this and catch more impulse buys.

 

15 hours ago, leadeater said:

True but as an advertiser it would great to know if you are spending your money wisely and effectively.

If I was an advertiser, I would love to be able to better target ads, my biggest issue with this really comes down to Google not only using their own data, but also collecting data from third party sources to capture things like credit and debit card expenditures.  I would much prefer if these kind of services operated on something like an opt-in/opt-out program and only used the data that they directly collected.