Afterpay, part of Block, Inc. has integrated Square’s merchant and transaction data into Afterpay Ads, creating an advertising platform built on commerce data, combining Square’s merchant ecosystem insights with Afterpay’s consumer behaviour data.
The integration aims to unlock audience intelligence across industries and demographics. The result is an omni-channel advertising platform powered by payment data from both sides of the counter, predicting purchase intent through pre-transaction financial behaviours.
“We’re not just adding more data; we’re making it easier for businesses of all types and sizes, to reach real customers at the right moment. This integration marks our evolution into a unified commerce intelligence platform that shows the complete customer journey helping brands understand why people buy, not just what they buy,” Andrew Gilbert, VP advertising at Afterpay Ads, said.
The integration enhances the Afterpay Ads portfolio, which brings together Afterpay Curate (offsite), Afterpay Media Network (offsite) and Afterpay’s Affiliate program (onsite), making audience insights accessible for businesses of all sizes and enabling them to launch campaigns quickly, measure return, and scale with confidence – while keeping sensitive financial and transaction data safe and private.
With insights captured across more than 80 verticals and sub verticals, the Afterpay Ads offering uncovers the ‘unknown customer’ and the ‘unknown behaviours’ that traditional retail media networks miss, revealing the full spectrum of Australian shopping patterns, and making those customers known to brands.
From corner cafés to purchases from global brands, this ‘whole wallet’ view reveals the real-life moments that drive purchase decisions: the gym visit that sparks an activewear purchase, the local market shop that signals sustainable values, the coffee habit that defines a daily routine and reveals the hidden connections between unplanned purchases.
Platform advantages include wholly unique data asset, predictive advantage, merchant diversity, deterministic data advantage, omnichannel activation, and unknown Customer Discovery.
The omni-channel platform will define audience segments with both merchant and consumer financial data. It will also show purchase intent before it becomes purchase behaviour.
It includes category breadth spanning every touchpoint in the Australian consumer journey, and offers real transaction insights, not cookies or assumptions — delivering authentic consumer behaviour data across online and in-store environments.
The platform meets customers at moments of highest intent across all shopping channels, and illuminates hidden shopping patterns that traditional retail media networks overlook.
The platform connects brands to Australia’s most engaged commerce audience through a single solution that spans local businesses to national retailers, delivering reach and relevance at scale.
For brands, the integration transforms fragmented data into unified customer understanding – delivering both depth of insight and breadth of reach that drives measurable campaign performance. Every campaign benefits from these indepth insights through higher relevance, better timing, and more precise targeting that turns audience insights into business outcomes.
“As Gen Z and Millennials continue to reshape commerce with new financial habits and cross-category shopping behaviours, our insights capture these evolving patterns in real time. This helps brands stay ahead of shifting consumer preferences with life-stage intelligence that reveals not just what customers buy, but when they’re ready to buy it to better grow their business,” Gilbert said.
