This feature is part of an open beta and is subject to change.
Overview
Customer Match in Google Analytics helps maximize coverage for remarketing efforts, ensuring that your campaigns reach the most relevant audiences. It increases your addressable audiences exported to your linked Google advertising products when other user identifiers, such as third-party cookies, are not available.
When a customer completes a conversion on your website, you may receive first-party customer data such as an email address, name, home address, or phone number. This data can be collected and sent to Google in a hashed form through user-provided data collection, and then used to supplement your Analytics audiences through Customer Match.
Benefits
Customer Match in Google Analytics supplements your audiences exported to your linked Google Ads accounts by matching your consented, hashed customer data with Google data to increase your addressable audience when other user identifiers are not available.
You can use Customer Match with already collected data and without manually creating customer lists in Google Ads, reducing the time to get started and the redundancies in your setup.
Considerations
Campaigns using Smart Bidding and optimized targeting will automatically include all the Customer Match lists in your account to enhance your ad campaign performance for your goals, such as conversions. If you don’t want your Customer Match lists to be automatically used to improve your campaign's performance, you can either:
- Opt out of auto-including unapplied Customer Match lists that are accessible to your account by following these steps.
- Remove specific lists that you don’t want to use in Smart Bidding and optimized targeting from your account.
Keep in mind that:
- This will not affect the targeting settings for your campaign. For example, if your campaign uses optimized targeting, your ads will be shown to users who are more likely to convert.
- Even if your Customer Match lists aren’t relevant to all your campaigns, Smart Bidding and optimized targeting will automatically learn which Customer Match lists are helpful to your campaign's performance and continuously optimize list application in real-time.
- Customer Match lists won’t be used if you’re using manual bidding strategies.
- Auto-inclusion of unapplied Customer Match lists in Smart Bidding or optimized targeting is available for YouTube, YouTube Video Action campaign, and will soon be available for in-feed ads and Search ads.
Learn more About Customer Match
Activating Customer Match
To activate Customer Match in Google Analytics, complete these steps:
- Set up user-provided data collection for your for your Analytics property.
- Link your Analytics property to Google’s advertising products like Google Ads, Display & Video 360, or Search Ads 360, and enable personalized advertising.
Customer Match in Google Ads vs. Google Analytics
Customer Match in Google Ads and Google Analytics are both tools that can help you improve the coverage for remarketing efforts, ensuring that your campaigns reach the most relevant audiences, but user-provided data can be used for already created audiences when implemented with Google Analytics.
Customer Match in Google Ads allows you to create a CSV file including customer data and upload it into Google Ads or you can connect a new data source to incorporate this targeting into your campaigns. Customer Match in Google Ads does not work the same as imported Google Analytics audiences. Customer Match support for Analytics bridges this gap by allowing you to use the same mechanism to supplement your Analytics audiences exported to Google Ads accounts.
Using Customer Match in Google Ads and Analytics
You can use Customer Match in Google Analytics for these benefits:
- Build deeper relationships with your customers or acquire new ones
- Alternative audience strategy that is easily scaleable
- Important signal in Smart Bidding and optimized targeting
If you are already using Customer Match in your linked Google advertising product, enabling the Google Analytics integration with Customer Match allows you to get first-party data performance benefits and future-proof your setup by supplementing tag-based Analytics audiences dependent on third-party cookies.
If you’re using Smart Bidding or optimized targeting and Customer Match, your Customer Match lists may be used to improve your campaigns’ performance. Your Customer Match lists are used in Smart Bidding and optimized targeting to help you get the best performance.