Google aims to connect online ads to physical stores

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Google attempts to integrate what customers look at after clicking on an online ad and what they actually buy at a brick-and-mortar location. revenue last year. That puts it in the best position to capture any additional marketing dollars spent on computers and mobile devices.

Google unveiled the storesales measurement tool Tuesday in San Francisco at an annual conference it hosts for its advertisers.

This meeting is an opportunity not only for Google to flaunt its new tools, but to work on regaining ground with advertisers who have recently boycotted YouTube.

Major advertisers began pulling back two months ago over concerns that Google hadn’t prevented major brand advertising from appearing alongside extremist video clips promoting hate and violence.

Google is also introducing new ways to help merchants drive more traffic to their physical stores, such as by displaying locations of nearby stores when watching ads on YouTube, something Google already does for nonvideo ads. Other tools are aimed at giving merchants a better understanding on how digital ads appearing across a variety of devices are affecting their sales.

Most of these new analytics draw upon Google’s inroads in “machine learning” — a way of “training” computers to behave more like humans — to interpret the data. Google’s search engine and Chrome web browser are a rich source of data about people’s interests and online activities that it can feed into machine-learning systems.

Just last week, Google unveiled new ways that machine learning can help people identify flowers or pull up restaurant reviews just by pointing a camera. Now, Google is showing how it plans to use machine learning to make more money.

Google already knows what you like based on the searches you make and the videos you watch. Online ads are then targeted to those interests. From there, Google can tell when you click on an ad and if you make an online purchase based on that.

The new program takes that tracking into physical stores.

Google’s tool won’t work for cash payments or the 30 per cent of U.S. card transactions that Google can’t currently access.

Shoppers remain anonymous, meaning they aren’t identified by their names, according to Google. And the company says it doesn’t share any of its anonymized information with its customers; instead, it targets ads at individuals who fit demographic profiles sought by advertisers.

Google gives its users the option to limit the company’s tracking and control what types of ads they are shown — although in practice, relatively few users tweak such settings.