Google announced they are making view-through conversion tracking for banners on the Content Network last Wednesday. So if someone sees your banner on a publisher's site running AdSense and comes to your site within 30 days you can capture the conversion.
Ok we know they have always been able to know when the banner runs - it gets called from Google - but to be able to track if the people who saw the ad convert takes the loading of a cookie when the banner loads in the browser.
This seems a little intrusive and given Google noted they were testing this months ago so they could launch it - "Earlier this year, we mentioned our plans to improve the measurement of conversions for display advertising campaigns on the Google Content Network" - means they have been tracking people's activities for some time.
When it was a method of tracking numbers of clicks to number of conversions, you had the click and the load of a cookie based on the action, but to start tracking just from the banner being seen - while a boon to marketers calls privacy issues in to the mix.
The bigger question is how long has this tracking been in place and what type of information has been captured?
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