Chrome for Android: Advertising Goldmine, Google Tracks Data from Desktop to Phone

Here's another reason for all of Android users to be jealous of the tiny percentage of people that are running Android Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0 or higher) on their phones: Google Chrome is now available on all ICS devices.

Google Chrome for Android will bring several improvements to browsing on an Android device, including the ability to sync bookmarks across devices. In the official announcement on the Google Mobile blog, the company said:

Like the desktop version, Chrome for Android Beta is focused on speed and simplicity, but it also features seamless sign-in and sync so you can take your personalized web browsing experience with you wherever you go, across devices.

Google appears to have taken a page from the Chrome extension Google Chrome to Phone, which allows users to carry over any open tabs from their desktop to their mobile device. This is especially helpful for moving items such as Google Maps directions from the desktop to a mobile device.

By keeping a user signed in to an account, Google will be able to track that specific person across several devices. Google says that users can view open tabs that they left open on their computer so long as they remain signed in.

Google also promises smarter auto-complete suggestions. If you visit a site often on your computer, you'll also get an autocomplete suggestion for it on your mobile device, so you can spend less time typing, says Google in the announcement.

The internet search giant prefaced tracking capabilities with the consolidation of the company's privacy policies late last month. In the privacy policy update, Google said, We may combine the information you submit under your account with information from other Google services or third parties in order to provide you with a better experience and to improve the quality of our services.

Advertising Age has pointed out that Google was unifying its services in order to trove data more efficiently.

The more data and the more signals that you know about any particular cookie or users, the more predictive you can be, said CEO of social-targeting company 33 Across, Eric Wheeler, in an interview with AdAge. Their data set is being stitched together in a way that I think can bring tremendous value to advertisers.

If Wheeler is correct, and Google is able to bring tremendous value to advertisers, that could also bring tremendous value to the company.

In 2011, Google earned $36.531 billion in advertising revenues. That makes up 96.4 percent of the total $37.906 billion in revenues they made on the year. What's more impressive is that the year-over-year growth of advertising revenue continues to grow. From 2010-2011, advertising revenue grew 29 percent.

Of the $36.531 billion that Google earned from ads, $26.145 billion came from the Google website alone. The other money came from advertising on other Google services. Since the default search engine on the Google Chrome browser is the company's--their advertising cash cow--the company can expect more searches to be made on the Google website, and therefore, has a good reason to expect another year-over-year increase in advertising revenue.