Google is testing a pilot program to help retailers better figure out if their online ads are driving in-store sales, reports The Wall Street Journal, which says the company currently has six advertisers on board, and is using data from Acxiom, DataLogix, LiveRamp, and Epsilon.

The program is reportedly an AdWords feature called In-Store Attribution Transaction Reporting. The data companies and retailers, according to the report, can take purchases and link them back to users’ cookies, which are matched to anonymous Google click IDs, and Google can tell which ads generated in-store sales, and how much they generated.

Advertisers will also see a new column in AdWords showing in-store sales data, it says.

The only advertising partner to be named in the report is Michaels.

Back in the fall, Google was said to be testing a program that uses consumers’ smartphones to track their locations and physical world shopping activities to give data to advertisers as evidence for online ads that led to in-store purchases.

John McDermott recently reported in a Digiday article:

Google is beta-testing a program that uses smartphone location data to determine when consumers visit stores, according to agency executives briefed on the program by Google employees. Google then connects these store visits to Google searches conducted on smartphones in an attempt to prove that its mobile ads do, in fact, work.

If someone conducts a Google mobile search for “screwdrivers,” for instance, a local hardware store could bid to have its store listing served to that user. By pairing that person’s location data with its database of store listings, Google can see if the person who saw that ad subsequently visited the store.

Prior to that, Google launched the Estimated Total Conversions feature in AdWords.

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