As recently reported by Bloomberg, “select Google advertisers have had access to a potent new tool to track whether the ads they ran online led to a sale at a physical store in the U.S.” How? Thank you to an undisclosed millionaire arrangement between Google and Mastercard.
Essentially - according to Bloomberg, citing 2 people who participated in the deal - Google paid Mastercard (and potentially other card networks), millions of dollars to get access to the offline sales data. The extracted data were in turn provided by Google to the advertisers to track if an online ad led to a purchase in a physical store.
This, without either Google or Mastercard informing hundreds of millions of Mastercard cardholders around the world.
According to Google, the users can opt out of this behind the scene ad-tracking by turning off “Web and App Activity” in their Google account. However this setting is not easy to find at all. In addition, offline purchases are not “Web” nor “App” activities.
You can find an easy step-by-step guide to turn off Google Web & App Activity at the following link:
https://www.wikihow.com/Turn-Off-Google-Web-%26-App-Activity
Hope this helps!
To read the full Bloomberg article, click the link or image here below.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/google-and-mastercard-cut-a-secret-ad-deal-to-track-retail-sales