Twitter knows where you shop

Twitter Inc. (NYSE:TWTR) wants to beef up its advertising revenue and its advertising partners. In order to do that, it has to provide measurable ROI statistics to its clients. Well, of course Twitter already has that ability in the bag.

Within the past few months, you may have noticed the prevalence of Promoted Tweets on your Twitter feed. These can be purchased in order to gain your company more views and traction. Well, Twitter can tell who has and who hasn’t seen specific Promoted Tweets.

To illustrate, say you saw a Promoted Tweet from a popular pet company called Loveable Pet. Then, a few days later, you stop into your local Loveable Pet and come out with pet food as well as a few toys. Even if you don’t remember seeing the tweet, both Twitter and Loveable Pet know you saw it.

So, how do they know what you did and didn’t see? Well, Twitter works with a Colorado-based marketing company called Datalogix. They have a database of loyalty information from about 1,5000 retailers. Moreover, Twitter gives Datalogix an email list of users who have seen a Promoted Tweet.

Datalogix would then cross-reference their data. They would link users who bought pet food from Loveable pet within the past month to those who followed the Promoted Tweet. Also, your data is protected. Your information such as your phone number, email address and home address are all hashed.

So, Datalogix cannot find out where you live or call you. However, they can give you a unique code based on your shopping and viewing history. This code is then compiled into a report for Twitter and the retailer to show how well the Promoted Tweet worked.

Datalogix has been working with Facebook since 2012, and they started working with Twitter in 2013. They are now testing how well Promoted Tweets work for brick-and-mortar stores that don’t have minimal online offerings.