Meanwhile, you’re leaving tracks out in the physical world — not only the location history of your phone, but also the trail of payments you leave behind you if you pay with a credit card, debit card, or app (as millions of us do).
Coordinating all those different online and offline data points into one single person’s profile has basically been the holy grail of advertising for years now. Facebook, the world’s second-biggest advertising company (Google’s largest, and everyone else is a distant third), got there first when it launched Facebook Atlas in 2014. That service let Facebook generate universal cross-platform profiles: Any activity on any device you’ve logged into Facebook on counts as “you,” and can be collated into one profile for measuring advertising efficacy.
Google also introduced some offline measurements to its online tool suite back in 2014, when it started using phone location data to try to match store visit location data to digital ad views. But a store doesn’t make any money when you simply walk into it; you need to buy something. So Google’s tracking that very granularly now, too.
