Commerce audience sharing allows commerce partners, such as retailers or marketplaces, to share first-party data segments with their advertising partners, such as brands or sellers. This collaboration allows advertising partners to reach new consumers and helps to drive increased sales of their goods sold through their commerce partners platforms. Commerce partners have controls that enable the safe and secure sharing of their audiences. Any campaign utilising a commerce partner's audience can only direct traffic back to the commerce partner's website.
Learn how to create a commerce media through Google Ads campaign.
On this page
- Benefits
- When to use
- Eligibility and requirements
- Instructions to share and use commerce audiences
- Instructions to link advertising partner and commerce partner accounts
- Bear in mind
Benefits
The value for commerce partners:
- Securely share your first-party data segments with advertising partners to improve campaign performance, drive traffic to your website and build meaningful relationships with your most trusted partners.
The value for advertising partners:
- Access valuable first-party data segments from your commerce partners to improve campaign performance and drive sales of your products. Combine shared audiences with your own first-party data segments to reach your target audience across all supported commerce media campaign types.
When to use
Commerce audience sharing is best used when:
- Commerce partners want to share audiences with campaigns that they run on behalf of their advertising partners.
- Commerce partners want to share audiences with advertising partners who are running in a self-service capacity.
Eligibility and requirements
Only eligible commerce media network campaigns can use commerce audiences. To use this feature, you must link your advertising partner's Google Ads account to the commerce partner's Google Merchant Center and advertising data sharing account.
To check whether your advertising partner accounts have active links to commerce partner accounts:
- Go to Data Manager within the Tools menu
.
- Under 'Connected products', find the 'Advertising partners' and 'Google Merchant Center' line items.
- Review and confirm that both entries are actively linked to commerce partner's accounts.
In addition to linking accounts, the commerce partner must have relevant data segments within their advertising data sharing account. You can share audience segments with eligible advertising partners.
The feature supports all available and eligible audience types within Google Ads. Learn how to reach your audience.
- To share an audience segment, the participating advertising partners and commerce partners must meet the standard requirements to create or maintain it. For example, if using Customer Match, both accounts must meet the criteria to use Customer Match.
- When using audience sharing:
- The commerce partner will have access to metrics related to campaign performance such as performance and spend metrics related to ad impressions, clicks and conversions.
- The advertising partner will have access to details related to the segments that you share, such as segment name, customer type, list size, membership status and conversion data from your website such as performance metrics related to conversions.
Instructions to share and use commerce audiences
To share a commerce audience, the audience segment must first exist within the commerce partner's data sharing account. Learn more about audiences to review your desired audience type and the steps to create.
Expand the sections below for details on how to share a commerce audience, if you're a commerce partner or how to use a commerce audience, if you're an advertising partner.
How to share commerce audiences (for commerce partners)
Follow these steps to share your audience with a commerce media campaign:
- Go to Audience Manager within the Tools menu
- Select the desired data segments to share by selecting the tick box.
- Select the 'Share with partners' drop-down in the blue bar that appears.
- You'll find options to Share or Stop sharing.
- Select Share to bring up a list of eligible advertising partners.
- You'll only find actively linked advertising partners in the list.
- Select the desired advertising partners with whom you want to share the audiences, and then select 'Next'.
- Review the summary for any issues. If there are no issues, select the Share button to share your audiences with the selected advertising partners.
Note:
- Any actively shared audiences will show a 'Shared' badge next to the audience name. Hover over the badge to view which commerce partner is sharing the audience. If you want to stop sharing an audience with an advertising partner, follow the same steps but select the option to Stop sharing.
- If you want to stop sharing an audience with an advertising partner, follow the same steps but select the option to Stop sharing.
How to use shared commerce audiences with commerce media network campaigns (for advertising partners)
After a commerce partner has shared an audience with an advertising partner, follow these steps to utilise the audience:
- Go to Audience Manager within the Tools menu
- Review the list of audience segments and identify segments that have a 'Shared' badge under their name.
- Hover over the badge to view which commerce partner is sharing the audience.
- Select the shared commerce audiences that you'd like to apply to campaigns by selecting the tick box.
- Select the 'Add to' drop-down in the top blue bar.
- Select the desired campaigns and targeting settings for the audiences.
- Select 'Add audience segments' to add the selected audiences to the selected campaigns.
Note:
- Learn more about adding audiences to campaigns or ad groups.
- You can only use a commerce partner's shared audiences for campaigns that drive traffic to the specific domain that the partner allows.
Instructions to link advertising partner and commerce partner accounts
Link your Google Ads account to your commerce partner’s Merchant Center account
To review and accept Google Merchant Center linking requests:
- Go to Data Manager within the Tools menu
- Under 'Connected products', find the 'Google Merchant Center' entry in the UI and select Manage and link.
- For pending links, navigate to the 'Received' tab and review the request and select Approve.
Link your Google Ads account to your commerce partner’s data sharing account
To review and accept data sharing linking requests:
- Go to Data Manager within the Tools menu
- Under 'Connected products', find the 'Advertising partners' entry in the UI and select Manage and link.
- For pending links, navigate to the 'Received' tab and review the request and select Approve.
Note:
- When you accept the link to the data sharing account, new conversion action(s), such as a purchase reported by a partner will be created
- Accepting the Data Manager linking requests doesn’t grant commerce partners direct access to the advertising Google Ads account.
Unlinking or managing links between accounts
You can review and manage links to your Google Ads account at any time through Data Manager within the Tools menu 
Bear in mind
- Advertising partners can only use audiences shared through this method for commerce media network campaigns.
- Brands can combine shared audiences with their own first-party data, but all campaigns using a shared audience must direct back to the approved domain.
- Advertising partners only have access to audiences that the commerce partner chooses to share.
