Google’s New User Tracking Unifies Mobile Apps And Mobile Web Browsers

Google is using experimental technology that connects users’ behavior in mobile apps with their behavior on the mobile web, according to sources, including a report by Advertising Age.  This technology would present a new method for tracking smartphone users, so marketers are certainly taking note.

Typically, a smartphone user who clicks on an ad that they see in a mobile app is tracked separately from a user who surfs the mobile web, even if these are in fact the same person.  Google’s new method intends to bridge the technologies that track clicks on ads in mobile apps and visits to a webpage, thereby making it possible for the data to reflect when these are, in actuality, the same user.

While Google would benefit greatly from this unified approach, allowing the company to take credit for leading users from ad clicks to website visits, advertisers also have reasons for wanting to unite mobile app and mobile web activity.  Having the ability to identify a user’s interactions with any number of apps and web pages would allow marketers to refine the display of related ads in separate apps, therefore being able to avoid unintentionally showing a person the same ads over and over.  Additionally, advertisers would be able to identify whether a user who saw a product advertised in an app ultimately made a purchase on the mobile web, and vice versa.  As always, this additional user information could prove invaluable to all types of marketers.

Google released a statement about this technology, explaining the company’s intent.  “As an alternative to less transparent methods, we’re doing some tests to help businesses run consistent ad campaigns across a device’s mobile browser and mobile apps, using existing anonymous identifiers, while enabling people to use the established privacy controls on Android and iOS,” Google’s statement said.

In the past, on the Web, advertisers have added “cookies” into a user’s browser as a way to track their activity.  This information keeps track of the pages that are viewed by a user, and can be used to determine which ads are displayed and to understand their influence.  For example, when a website displays a Chevy ad, credit can be attributed to that website if a user subsequently visits chevrolet.com.  However, cookies aren’t as effective on mobile devices, where users see ads in two distinct places – websites that they visit via mobile browsers and apps such as Facebook or Candy Crush Saga, which use a separate mobile identifier.  While the mobile browsers still use cookies, ads that are displayed in apps track user’s behavior separately.  Google’s test of its new technology connects these two together, and the implications could be massive for all levels of marketers.  However, Google notes that users will continue to have the ability to opt out of ad tracking within both apps and mobile web browsers.