When people interact directly with your business online and offline, it provides an opportunity to learn more about who they are and how you can address their needs.
This information is particularly valuable because it’s unique to your business and comes directly from your customers, especially if you enable conversion based customer lists in your Account Settings. Customer Match is an advertising tool that helps you make the most of your own data.
Customer Match helps you reach these customers, re-engage with them, and find new customers like them across Search, Shopping, Gmail, YouTube, and Display.
Customer Match helps you reach custom segments of your existing customers and deliver a tailored message when it’s most relevant to them by uploading first-party customer data, which we use to match against Google users.
Why invest in Customer Match?
Customer Match lets you use first-party data to share the unique insights you have about your customers beyond Google’s understanding. That can allow you to deepen existing customer relationships—or build new ones—across all of Google's properties in a privacy-safe way. This is becoming increasingly important as Google phases-out cookie-based remarketing due to privacy, browser, and regulation changes.
Customer Match can provide one of the most scalable product solutions for you to make the most of your first-party data while continuing to get the performance benefits that you expect from Google.
Benefits of Customer Match
Beginning Q2 2022, campaigns using Smart Bidding and optimized targeting will auto-include all the Customer Match lists in your account to enhance your ad campaign performance for your goals, such as conversions. Previously, you could experience these performance benefits only if you manually applied all available Customer Match lists to your campaigns. 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.
- Customer Match lists have a maximum membership duration of 540 days. Any list memberships added or refreshed more than 540 days ago will no longer be eligible. To stay eligible, a list must have at least 100 members added or updated within the last 540 days. We recommend regularly refreshing your Customer Match lists. You can refresh your Customer Match lists through several methods, including continuous syncing with third-party CRMs or manual uploads.
- 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.
- Build deeper relationships with your customers or acquire new ones
- Connect your existing customers with another product or service they may like.
- Find new customers similar to your best customers.
- Reach your existing customers with special offers and messaging.
- Re-activate dormant customers.
- Alternative audience strategy that is easily scalable
- As we move towards a cookie-less world, Customer Match lists will continue to enable you to reach your most valuable users and be an important tool in the way you manage your audiences without relying on traditional tag based website visitors.
- Important signal in Smart Bidding and optimized targeting
- Your Customer Match lists are used in Smart Bidding and optimized targeting to help you get the best performance.
- If you’re using Smart Bidding or optimized targeting and Customer Match, your Customer Match lists may be used to improve your campaigns’ performance. Customer lists will soon be automatically included in Smart Bidding. Different campaign types will start including customer lists at different times.
Timeline for untargeted Customer Match lists to be auto-included is as follows:
| Ad campaign type | Timelines |
|---|---|
| YouTube VAC | Launched in Q4 of 2022 |
| YouTube | Launched in Q4 of 2022 |
| Search ads | Launched in Q3 of 2023 |
| Shopping | Launched in Q1 of 2024 |
| Demand Gen (non-YouTube ads) | Launched in Q3 of 2023 |
| Gmail ads | Launched in Q1 of 2024 |
If you don’t want your Customer Match lists to be included to improve your Smart Bidding or optimized targeting performance, opt-out of automatically using available customer lists in your account:
- Select the customer ID for the individual account.
- If you are an agency or someone who manages multiple Google Ads, Display and Video 360, or Search Ads 360 accounts, this opt-out is not available for your Google Ads manager account, Display and Video 360, or Search Ads 360 account. Learn how to Find your Google Ads customer ID
- From the page menu on the left, click the Admin icon
, then click Account settings.
- In the “Customer Match” section, uncheck the “Use all Customer Match lists in Smart Bidding or Optimized Targeting” checkbox.
Learn how to remove specific Customer Match lists from your account
Basics | Get started with Customer MatchLearn the Customer Match basics and how to use it to achieve your business goals. |
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Set-up | Set-up up your Customer MatchCreate or update a campaign to target your Customer Match audience — customers from your uploaded data file who are Google users. |
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Upload data | Upload your Customer Match dataLearn about the options you have to activate and update CRM data with Customer Match. |
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Troubleshoot | Fix issues with your customer listsFix issues with your customer lists. |
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Privacy and SecurityLearn about collecting customer data in a privacy-safe way. |
