SAN FRANCISCO: Google is testing a way to tie online ads to brick-and-mortar store purchases, a move whetting marketing appetites while fueling privacy worries.
A product called “Google Attribution” was unveiled at a marketing conference this month in San Francisco by the Internet giant. Google has long been able to determine when users click on an ads and make a purchase, but linking online and offline habits takes its analytics a step further.
Google senior vice president Sridhar Ramaswamy, who announced that Attribution is in test mode with a limited number of partners and will be rolled out to more advertisers in coming weeks, touted the tool as being able to answer the long-challenging question of whether marketing campaigns are working.
“Google Attribution makes it possible for every marketer to measure the impact of their marketing across devices and across channels,” Ramaswamy said.
“Data-driven attribution uses machine learning to determine how much credit to assign to each step in the consumer journey — from the first time they engage with your brand for early research down to the final click before purchase.”
Real-world customer e-mail addresses or loyalty plan information can be woven with Google data from services such as AdWords, Google Analytics and DoubleClick Search to provide “a complete view” of marketing performance, according to the company.
Using artificial intelligence, or machine learning, to better analyze and understand consumer behavior to target ads and promote sales was a major theme of the conference.
For several years now, AdWords has enabled advertisers to measure visits to real-world stores stemming from online campaigns, Ramaswamy noted.
“Still, measuring store visits is just one part of the equation,” Ramaswamy said.
“You also need insights into how your online ads drive sales for your business.”
Real-world transactions matched back to Google ads are handed in “a secure and privacy-safe way,” with store sales information reported in aggregated and anonymized forms to protect individual privacy, according to the company.
Tying online activity to offline shopping decisions has been a “holy grail” for advertisers for quite some time, and comes with worrisome privacy implications, according to ACLU senior policy analyst Jay Stanley.
Attribution threatens to intrude on a core tenant of privacy, that people can have dealings with one party not spill over into affairs with other parties they interact with, Stanley contended.
“This is an evolution, not a revolution; another step toward increased monitoring of individuals,” Stanley said.
“Each step raises the question ‘Where does this all stop?’“
Stanley expected Google to be on its best behavior when it came to handling the growing trove of information about users, but that even the best of intentions could crack under the “enormous hydraulic pressure of the profit motive.”
“We have the full fury and genius of the capitalist system being driven toward monitoring people in ever increasing detail and companies are competing to do so,” Stanley said
“It will not stop without some sort of rules in which we as a society express our values through legal protections.”
Google and Facebook dominate the online ad world, and what one does to prove its worth to advertisers is likely to be copied by the other, according to Silicon Valley analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group.
Attribution promised to give Google a way to assure advertisers they are getting their money’s worth at the firm’s online venues.
“The big problem is that showing conversion from ad consumption to purchase has been horrible,” Enderle said of online marketing.
“This has been a problem for a long time. Google is trying to make a metric so they get credit for it when you do purchase after viewing an ad.”
Data showing which ads are translating into real sales should mean that the relevance of ads people see online will improve as marketers abandon mis-aimed or ineffectively tailored messages, the analyst reasoned.
“You are going to be hit with ads for things that you might actually want to buy, so you are going to spend a lot more money,” Enderle predicted.
Worries about privacy sparked by linking offline and online activities are a decade or so late, because the time to protest was when collection began of the troves of data about people, the analyst argued.
“There really is no downside to this application,” Enderle said while discussing Google’s marketing metrics move.
“This is the good side of collecting data; it is what else is being done with the data that should be unnerving and that we really don’t know.”
Google linking online and offline worlds in new ad challenge
Google linking online and offline worlds in new ad challenge
Award winning Al Arabiya reporter recounts horrors of covering Sudan
- Almigdad Hassan describes his journey covering killings, hunger and disease
- RSF continues onslaught as world fails to stop Sudan war
LONDON: When war erupted in Sudan in April 2023, Almigdad Hassan, a 27-year-old pharmacy graduate from the University of Khartoum, had just begun his first job at a pharmaceutical company.
Within days, the explosions that trapped him in the capital pushed him into frontline war reporting for Saudi Arabia broadcasters Al Arabiya and Al Hadath.
It was a decision that would later earn him an international free press award for courageous coverage of one of the world’s most underreported and inaccessible humanitarian catastrophes.
As most residents fled Khartoum, Hassan said he felt compelled to stay.
“Something inside me was driving me to stay, but I didn’t know what it was,” Hassan told Arab News after winning the Newcomer of the Year award from Free Press Unlimited, a Netherlands-based international press freedom organization.
“I just felt that this was my chance to use my talent in media to do something for my people and humanity.”
At the time, he took three days to accept Al Arabiya’s offer to become an official war correspondent, following a previous internship with the network.
He did not anticipate that the power struggle between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Abu Dhabi-backed Rapid Support Forces would spiral into a protracted war — now nearing its third anniversary and widely described as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
“Things escalated so quickly in Khartoum. Main roads and bridges were blocked, armored vehicles and military checkpoints were seen everywhere,” Hassan said, referring to the RSF’s seizure of Khartoum International Airport, the presidential palace, and several military bases in April 2023.
“Every time I carried my equipment and stepped outside to report, I did not know whether I would reach my assignment or make it back home. Every decision put my life at risk.”
He shared harrowing testimonies from survivors in displacement camps in El-Obeid, North Kordofan, where residents had fled violence in the RSF-controlled towns of Kadugli and Dilling in South Kordofan before their liberation during a major SAF army breakthrough last fortnight.
“I heard more than 10 accounts of grave human rights violations, including mass killings, torture, widespread gang rape, and arbitrary imprisonment,” Hassan said of his reporting last December.
Hassan recounted 15 months of reporting from RSF-controlled Khartoum before the SAF retook the capital last March, describing it as “the darkest time of my life.”
“Khartoum was hell back then. It was the worst place in the world in terms of security and the violation of every basic human right to a level no one can imagine,” Hassan said.
He recalled that the most harrowing scenes he witnessed came within the first week of the war, when “bodies of residents lay decomposing in the streets and were eaten by dogs.”
“This was the moment I realized our humanity was being erased, just as those bodies were slowly vanishing,” Hassan said, “but it reinforced my belief that documenting these horrors was my mission, no matter the risks.”
He reported attacks involving killings, rape, and arbitrary kidnappings carried out inside private homes. He also pointed to unofficial mass graves hastily dug into residential streets to bury the dead, while some bodies were left to decompose inside houses.
“The armed men would celebrate killing residents because anyone living in army-controlled areas was seen as supportive of the army,” Hassan said.
“These are not only media narratives. It is a reality people lived.”
Since the war began, both the RSF and SAF have been accused of committing atrocities. However, the RSF has been accused of genocide against non-Arab groups such as the Masalit, Fur, and Zaghawa tribes in West Darfur. Abu Dhabi has been accused of backing the RSF.
Last year, a detailed report produced by Amnesty International provides evidence for the presence of UAE armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles in Sudan being used by the RSF in particular. Amnesty also accuses the RSF of war crimes.
In August 2024, 15 months into the war, the UN-backed Famine Review Committee of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification declared famine in North Darfur’s Zamzam displacement camp, which had been under RSF blockade — the committee’s first such determination in more than seven years.
Last November, the UN declared famine in RSF-controlled Al-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, and Kadugli, the capital of South Kordofan, warning that a further 20 areas across Darfur and Greater Kordofan were at risk in what it described as “the world’s largest hunger crisis.”
Last fortnight, the global hunger monitor issued an alert saying famine thresholds for acute malnutrition had been surpassed in the contested North Darfur localities of Um Baru and Kernoi.
Hassan pointed to the lack of safety and severe movement restrictions in RSF-controlled areas, describing neighborhoods as “largely emptied of residents” and cut off, with no services or medical supplies.
By autumn 2024, months before Khartoum was reclaimed by the army, residents in some neighborhoods were dying from diseases such as dengue fever, with no access to basic medical supplies or care.
Hospitals, he said, were reporting at least four deaths a day.
During the outbreak, which also infected some of his fellow journalists, Hassan said he relied on his training as a pharmacist to assess the risks but was still “scared for my life, knowing the risk was high and there was little protection.”
He said he felt a responsibility to document both the military and humanitarian dimensions of the war, particularly in the absence of any rule of law or effective security presence.
People, he noted, were entirely dependent on humanitarian support at a time when aid organizations were denied access.
“It was hard to witness this as a human being, let alone document it as a journalist,” he said. “Even enemies have basic human rights that need to be maintained, but unfortunately, what I saw was that fighters and armed militia got used to the act of killing in a horrific manner.”
The RSF, he said, engaged in direct clashes that killed civilians while also burning entire villages and looting livestock, shops, and property. Once-bustling roads in Khartoum had become deserted, unrecognizable corridors of destruction.
According to UN figures, the conflict has displaced roughly 14 million people and killed hundreds of thousands.
Hassan said his work as a journalist allowed limited movement around Khartoum after complex security arrangements with both sides — a privilege unavailable to most civilians.
“Yet, we were often caught in crossfire and at risk of being killed by the other warring party, which viewed us as siding with the enemy,” he said.
“As journalists, we relied on solar power to charge our equipment and stay connected, which gave us more access than ordinary citizens. Even then, once we left our office — often our only safe space — we were completely isolated. If something happened to you in the streets, no one would know.”
Beyond the devastating loss of human life, Hassan said the violations extended to Sudan’s cultural heritage and national history.
Reporting from the aftermath of attacks on the presidential palace and the national museum, he said he witnessed the destruction and looting of artifacts tracing the country’s history since independence.
“I watched the country’s history being erased in front of my eyes,” he said, referring to damaged artifacts, gifts from earlier eras, and the destruction of classic cars once used by former presidents.
“I realized the brutality of this war when I saw people killing their own countrymen and destroying their own culture, heritage and history.”
Hassan described residents’ “hysterical happiness” in every area retaken by the army. Many, he said, likened life under RSF rule to “colonialism,” saying they were treated like foreigners rather than Sudanese.
Though both sides have been accused of violations, Hassan said people want a ruling authority that restores the basic dignity and human rights they lost.
In announcing the award, Free Press Unlimited said Hassan was recognized for his “dedication, courage, and ability to deliver compelling, accurate reporting under extreme conditions.”
Hassan said the recognition deepened his sense of responsibility toward humanity and strengthened his determination to continue reporting on the devastating war.
“With time, I understood the importance of what I do,” he said. “I realized how journalism can protect lives and deliver voices that would otherwise go unheard.”
He described the award as a shared responsibility with the international community. With his work now recognized globally, Hassan said his reach — and his mission — has only grown.
“It is no longer a job. It is my mission.”
