offline buying

When you purchase items in the real world, you know at a big box store.

Historical perspective: By June 2017, Google began tracking offline buying habits, according to the Washington Post. Google now knows when its users go to the store and buy stuff. The search giant said it has begun analyzing billions of credit card transaction records to show how many sales are generated by its online ad campaigns, even when purchases are made in a brick-and-mortar store. Google is working with partner companies to access roughly 70 percent of all credit- and debit-card transactions in the U.S., matching them to Google users via complex algorithms. Google says it anonymizes all data to hide the personal identity of shoppers.