Inside Google Ads podcast: Episode 125 - Customer Match

Customer Match is the holy grail of modern marketing. So I am shocked to find so many Google Ads practitioners still not leveraging this magical tool. As cookies crumble and regulations tighten, Customer Match is one of the few bridges you still have left to stability in the AI era.

Bringing your own first-party data into Google Ads is one of the single greatest competitive advantages you have. Because when everyone has access to the same smart bidding algorithms and everyone has access to the same AI targeting algorithms, the way your ads are going to win and do better than your competitors is by bringing the data that only you have, your customer data.

In this episode, I'm going to break down for you what Customer Match is, how to use it, strategies and tactics to employ, common troubleshooting so that you'll know exactly how to get the best results out of your customer data in Google Ads today and tomorrow. After all, you wouldn't dream of running ads without conversion tracking. Right? Right. So please don't even dream of running your ads without Customer Match.

I'm your host Jyll Saskin Gales. I spent six years working for big brands at Google and now I work for you. 

This is Inside Google Ads: Episode 125, Customer Match.

Now, of course, we can't talk about Customer Match without talking about the big catch. In order to leverage Customer Match in campaign targeting, you need to have an active Google Ads account in good standing with spend for at least 90 days and $50,000 in lifetime spend. 

However, even if you have not spent $50,000 or you think you'll never spend $50,000 on Google Ads, you should still upload your list. And here's why.

Even if you're not using your customer list in campaign targeting, that list just existing in your Google Ads account will make your campaigns smarter. It's going to be one of the many signals that your Smart bidding uses to drive the best results for your campaigns like PMax or Demand Gen. And just by uploading the list, you can go to your Audience Insights in Audience Manager and get unique insights about your customers. 

For example, you can see the demographics of your customer list and which Google audience segments they belong to–all without spending a penny actually targeting this list.

By the way, it's one of the many lessons I have in my course, Inside Google Ads. Learn more at learn.jyll.ca.

Now, once you do start using your customer list for targeting, how exactly do you do so? 

Customer Match is compatible with Search, Shopping, Gmail, YouTube, and Display. And there are a lot of unique ways to use it.

1. First is to either target the list or exclude the list. 

For example, you could run a Demand Gen campaign or a Video campaign where you are only targeting your existing customers with a new message. Maybe a sale coming up, a new product launch, something where yes, you do have email marketing, but email open rates aren't foolproof. Spam filters are getting more prevalent. It's another way to reach those exact same people across Google's platforms. Of course, you can also do the opposite and exclude customers. 

So, let's say you're focusing on some kind of sale or new offer and you don't want to put that ad in front of an existing customer. Exclude your customer list and you're good to go.

Customer Match also makes a great layer on top of your Search and Shopping campaigns, something called RLSA. I'll include a link in the episode description to my blog post all about Remarketing List for Search Ads. But essentially, you can target a larger pool of queries, maybe even leverage something like AI Max for the first time, but then apply your customer list on Targeting mode so that you only want to target these broader queries if it's already a customer of yours who of course would be more likely to buy again.

Or conversely, maybe you have some very expensive keywords you're advertising on and you don't want to waste money advertising to existing customers. So you could negate them from your campaign by adding your customer list as an audience exclusion. 

Some advertisers like to exclude current customers from their brand campaigns. For example, because current customers may just be looking to log in or find the support number. And so you don't want to waste your advertising dollars on that. Be careful though because if you're not advertising on your brand name, of course your competitors probably are. And the last thing you might want is when your customers are searching for you for them to see your competitor ads saying why they should switch to competitors instead. So there are definitely two sides to this coin about potentially excluding your customer list from a brand campaign. Proceed with caution.

2. Another growing way to use Customer Match is with customer life cycle goals.

This is a feature in Search, Shopping, and Performance Max campaigns that lets you guide the campaign to treat new customers and existing customers differently, potentially all within a single campaign or having exclusive campaigns for these different customer segments.

There are a few different flavors of customer life cycle goals. First is the New Customer Only mode which uses your Customer Match list essentially as an exclusion to ensure your Search, Shopping or PMax is only targeting new customers. Then there's a New Customer Value mode similar, but it's specifically looking for high-value new customers not just any new customers. There's Customer Retention mode, which does the opposite. It uses your Customer Match list to only target your existing customers. And then something coming soon called New Prospect mode, where it's not only not going to target your existing customers, it's not going to target anybody who's been to your website, search for your brand, it's looking for net net brand new people.

Now, I've come up with my 1% rule for customer life cycle goals, which is that unless your customer list is already as big as at least 1% of your target location, you probably don't need this. 

So, for example, if you're in the US, unless your customer list already has 3.4 million people on it, you probably don't need customer life cycle goals. That being said, as AI Max and PMax continue to evolve and take over, my perspective on this might change, as it should. Your perspective should always be evolving as well. 

So, while customer life cycle goals are really designed with the largest of large advertisers in mind, it's possible that within the next year or two, more medium-size advertisers may want to leverage these features. And you can't use customer life cycle goals without Customer Match.

Something else you can't do without Customer Match is conversion-based customer lists. This is a way to take your conversion actions and turn them into a remarketing list. 

Let's just back up a step and make sure we understand the difference there. So, a conversion is an action that somebody takes that you're tracking in Google Ads: filling out a form, making a purchase, calling you, etc. It's a specific action. 

Whereas your data segments, a remarketing list, a retargeting list, this is a collection of people who have done something, a collection of customers who have purchased from you, a collection of website visitors who have been to your website, a collection of email newsletter subscribers who have subscribed to your email list. 

A conversion is an action at a point in time, whereas your data segment is a list of users who have done a certain thing.

Conversion-based customer lists are a way to bridge the gap between them. Taking that conversion event and building a list of people who have completed that conversion. So, a purchase event and now a conversion-based customer list of people who have completed a purchase. 

To use this, you need Customer Match and enhanced conversions in your account in order for these lists to start populating. For more on that. It's one of the many audience topics I dive into in my best-selling book, Inside Google Ads: Everything You Need to Know About Audience Targeting, available on Amazon, Google Play, and Kobo.

And something else that I actually just learned about while researching this episode is the lead form audience. Yeah, a few episodes back in Episode 118, I explained every single kind of asset in Google Ads, and one of them was the lead form asset. People who fill out your lead form directly from the ad without going to your website. That then opens up another opportunity for lead form audiences, an audience of people who have completed your lead form. 

Wouldn't it be cool if Google did something similar like a call asset audience of people who called you from your ads or a text asset audience of people who message you from your ads? Those are just on my wish list for now, but I wouldn't be surprised if that comes to fruition in the future. One more thing that is again only enabled by using Customer Match.

Now that we've covered some of the many ways you can use Customer Match in Google Ads, let's talk about how to actually do the thing.

Because you’ve probably heard me and many other people say, "Share your data with Google Ads. Bring your data into Google Ads. Your first-party data is so important." Here's how that actually works. You need to figure out a privacy safe way to bring your customer list, your user data into the Google ecosystem.

So, first thing’s first, let's start with your list. Where does that data live? If you use something like Shopify or HubSpot or Salesforce, these actually have direct integrations with Google Ads you can find in data manager. So, that's a really easy way to configure it. But maybe you don't have a CRM at all. You just have a spreadsheet somewhere with your customer data, that's okay, too. You can do something called a manual upload. The most common way to upload data is to use an email address and/or a phone number, but something like a mailing address is also compatible. It may just have a lower match rate. 

So, whatever method you're going to use to upload that list into Google Ads, either some kind of direct connection, a manual upload, or maybe using something like Zapier to fill the gap in between, you're going to want to regularly upload your customer data into Google Ads. If you're the kind of business that gets multiple purchases or leads a day, you'll probably want to do this on a daily basis. Whereas, if you only get a few leads or purchases a month, it's probably okay to do this every other week or just once a month to keep that customer list fresh.

When you upload your Customer Match list, you'll see something called a match rate. And it's not unusual for it to be 70% or 80% and not 100%. That is a-okay. If it's only 20% to 30%, that suggests there may be some kind of data issue. But as long as you're in the 70% to 80% range or above, that's fine. 

Behind the scenes, Google is looking to match each of the email addresses or phone numbers you provide with an active matched record in its system. The simplest explanation just means it tries to find that user somewhere across Google that they're signed in, whether it's Gmail or YouTube or their Android phone or Chrome browser, whatever it might be. And understandably, not every single person on your list is going to be signed into Google at all times all the time. So that's why you won't have a 100% match rate, but it should still be pretty high.

Again, for more details on the nitty-gritty mechanisms, I go into this in lots of detail in my best-selling book, Inside Google Ads: Everything You Need to Know About Audience Targeting.

If you have not yet uploaded your customer data into Google Ads and you're just thinking about it, or maybe you already have, but you've never reviewed the policy requirements, here are three key things to know. 1. First is consent. You must have user consent before uploading their list into Google Ads. So, you can't just purchase a list from someone else and upload it. I mean, you can do that, but it's against Google policy. It may even be against the law in your country. So, you and your client could get in a lot of trouble. Please get consent.

2. That means number two, your privacy policy on your website must share that you are going to be sharing data with third parties like Google in order for you to be compliant. 

3. And then last but not least, sensitive interest categories. I covered this topic in detail in Episode 112 of this podcast, but essentially if you work in a sensitive interest category like healthcare, religion, personal hardship, etc., then you are not eligible to use Customer Match at all, not even uploading the list to use as a signal for Smart bidding and optimized targeting. 

And the reason is because, in these industries, it might be against the law to retarget people, or Google has just set a policy that they don't want you to because it could potentially be exploiting people's hardships.

For example, if someone has come to your rehab center, they probably don't want to be targeted again with ads about, 'Hey, if rehab didn't work, come back to us.' Like, no thank you.

So, I'm sorry to say that if you operate in any kind of sensitive interest category, you can't use any of your data segments, that includes no Customer Match.

But if you think you've been miscategorized in a sensitive interest category, it is absolutely worth appealing that to Google. 

For example, I had a Google Ads coaching client I met with and they were categorized in their account as being in a sensitive interest category, which meant they can’t use any of the features we've talked about today. And in my opinion, they were kind of on the edge as to whether or not they should be categorized that way. 

So I said, "Have you ever talked to Google about whether you could get this lifted?" 

And they spend enough that they do have a dedicated Google rep. So they said, "Hey, we don't think we're part of this category, and here’s why." And the Google rep was able to get the restriction lifted, which means now all of a sudden their Smart bidding got smarter, their optimized targeting got smarter. They were able to bring in all these additional signals. And according to the client, they saw an across-the-board small but noticeable improvement in CPA after that restriction was lifted. 

So I say that to say if you genuinely are in a sensitive interest category, then you're there and it's the policy. But if you do feel like you've been miscategorized, it's absolutely worth trying to escalate that to Google support.

Assuming that you are not in a sensitive interest category, what are your go-dos right now?

1. First is to make sure you are uploading your customer list.

You do that by going to tools, shared library, audience manager, hit the plus button, then upload a list manually. Or if you're integrating with something like Shopify, then you go to tools, data manager, activate that connection, and then configure what kind of list you want to come in. For example, all purchasers, email subscribers, etc.

2. Then, uploading customer lists is part of the battle. Keeping it up to date is the next part. I do so many Google Ads audits where I'll look at an account and I'll see, they have a Customer Match list. Oh, it was created in June 2022 and hasn't been updated since June 2022.

So, make sure you have a process in place to keep it updated if you don't have that direct integration. Set a weekly or monthly calendar reminder to ensure you're bringing all that rich data into Google so that your campaigns can keep leveraging that data to get you better results.

No matter your spend level, there is no excuse to not be uploading your compliant first-party customer data into Google Ads. It's one of the most important things you can do to get the best results in Google Ads, especially as more AI features are coming in where we don't get to control our bidding as much. We don't get to control our targeting as much. We don't get to control our creative as much because AI is doing more of that for us. 

But what does AI need to learn? Data. And the best data for AI is your conversion data and your customer data. It is not safe to advertise without it.

If you've got more questions about Customer Match, be sure to drop a comment wherever you are watching or listening to this right now. That's what helps me decide what to talk about in future episodes. 

I'm Jyll Saskin Gales and I'll see you next time inside Google Ads.