Starting early March 2024, Customer Match lists activated on Google Partner inventory or third-party exchange websites in the European Economic Area (EEA) will no longer be available for web and app. Google Ads and Display & Video 360 will continue to enable advertisers to use their own first-party data (as well as custom and expanded audiences) across Google’s owned & operated (O&O) properties.
Customer Match lets you reach your customers using the data they share with you. To incorporate this first-party data into your campaigns, you’ll first need to upload your data to Google Ads.
This article explains how to upload your data files. Before you begin you’ll need to create a customer list.
Before you begin
For an overview of how Customer Match works, read About Customer Match.
For more information about how Google uses the data files that you upload and how the matching process works, read How Google uses Customer Match data.
To use Customer Match, the data that you upload must be formatted correctly.
How to upload your Customer Match data
There are five ways to upload your Customer Match data.
Create and upload your customer list
- In your Google Ads account, click the Tools icon
.
- Click the Shared library drop-down in the section menu.
- Click Audience manager.
- Click Audience lists from the Page Menu on the left.
- Click the plus button
to create a new audience list.
- Choose 'Customer list'.
- Choose whether to upload a plain text data file or a hashed data file.
- If you choose to upload customer data in plain text, the private customer data in your file (Email, Phone, First name and Last name) will be hashed on your computer using the SHA256 algorithm before sending it securely to Google's servers. Country and postcode data won’t be hashed.
- If you choose to hash your data, make sure that it meets the requirements described in format your customer data file.
- Choose your new file.
- If you agree, tick the box 'This data was collected and is being shared with Google in compliance with Google's Customer Match policies'.
- Set a membership duration. The default membership duration is unlimited, but you can set a custom time limit.
- Click Upload and create list.
- You can view the progress of uploading your data file under 'Audiences lists'. This process may take up to 48 hours to complete.
- Once your data has uploaded, you’ll see a file upload success page. You’ll see information about the number of rows that successfully uploaded and your match rate percentage.
- You’ll also see the last five file operations and understand the upload statistics for those operations.
To successfully use your customer data file, it’s important to ensure that you format your customer data file correctly.
- Note: If you ticked the box in Account Settings for 'conversion-based customer lists', you can use the customer lists generated for you under Audience Manager > Audience Segments.
API upload
Customer Match upload partner (CMU)
Customer Match upload partners (CMUs) can upload match keys like email addresses, phone numbers and postal addresses without login credentials to your Google Ads account. You’ll need to work with your CMU partner to determine a refresh frequency.
Some of the key benefits of using a CMU to upload your Customer Match data are:
- You don’t give emails directly to Google.
- CMU completes PII protections and is privacy-safe.
- CMU pushes segmented lists to Google Ads and automatically refreshes your lists.
- You don’t need to provide Google Ads login credentials.
- The CMU can expand list size and match rate.
Third-party automation solution
Connect a new data source
Review the process of connecting a data source to create a new customer list for supported data sources.
