Google Tests Way to Track Consumers From Mobile Browsers to the Apps They Use
For Advertisers, One Mobile User Has Previously Often Looked Like Two — Ebook — Advertising Age Essentials — Google has come up with a way to overcome the ad-targeting gap between mobile web visitors …
Context & Ripple Effects
Google has been assembling this capability piece by piece: AdSense for Mobile opened the mobile ad market back in 2007, and after new mobile privacy controls landed in 2011, the company spent this spring testing how to connect clicks to physical purchases via its web-user-to-in-store-sales matching program. The missing link throughout has been identity: a shopper browsing in Safari and then opening an app looked like two different people to advertisers.
The pickup on this story is unusually broad — the Wall Street Journal ran it twice alongside Marketing Land, 9to5Google, and Business Insider — reflecting how directly it hits ad buyers' budgets. It also fits a busy August for Google's ads business, which is simultaneously testing 'Listen Now' purchase-simplifying formats with Spotify, Rhapsody, and Beats Music.
First-order effects
- Advertisers running both mobile-web and in-app campaigns through Google can now deduplicate audiences and measure a single user across the two surfaces, redirecting budget that was previously double-spent or misattributed.
- App publishers in Google's network gain access to web-browsing behavior for targeting, expanding inventory value at the expense of walled-off competitors who cannot bridge browsers and apps.
Second-order effects
- Facebook and Twitter, whose logged-in apps already give them persistent mobile identities, face pressure to extend their own cross-device matching before Google closes the gap from the other direction — pricing power shifts toward whoever owns the fuller identity graph.
- Agencies and measurement vendors built around separate mobile-web versus in-app reporting will be pushed to adopt Google's unified numbers or lose credibility with clients comparing channel performance.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, mobile advertising consolidates around platform-level identity graphs where the browser-app distinction disappears for advertisers entirely — a structure that almost certainly draws fresh attention from privacy regulators, given that Google's 2011 mobile privacy controls were itself a response to earlier tracking concerns.
The trend: Mobile advertising is converging on cross-device identity graphs that dissolve the boundary between mobile web and native apps, with Google racing logged-in platforms like Facebook to own the unified view of the user.