While Google said in May 2017 it was using purchase data from unnamed payment processors to link online ads to transactions, Bloomberg discovered Thursday that one partner is Mastercard.
To recap, Google is using purchase data for a product called Store Sales Measurement product, which tracks the connection between online ads and in-store purchases.
“The holy grail for online marketers has been about closing the loop between digital media all the way to the store purchase,” Kishore Kanakamedala, Google’s director of product management, told AdExchanger back in May 2017.
Mastercard’s involvement with Google’s store measurement capability shines a light on the use of purchase data to qualify paid media.
Mastercard isn’t the only payment processor media buyers use to power their tools – Visa and American Express both sell transactional data. Advertisers want insights to measure the efficacy of their ads and to make more informed buys in the future, so they need a big pool to pull from.
Aggregators like Cardlytics partner with banks to access purchase data.
And purchase data is also available from aggregators such as Nielsen Catalina Solutions (NCS) and Oracle Data Cloud, which partner with merchants to supply data that can align online messaging to purchases. NCS in particular can drill down to the product level.
That’s more detail than the data that comes from payment processors or banks, which know where consumers buy, but not necessarily what they buy.
Ecommerce giant Amazon also makes its rich purchase dataset available to ad buyers. However, Amazon data is only made available within its own walled garden.
Click here for AdExchanger’s deep dive into who’s selling purchase data.
