Start Using Google’s Adwords Customer Match Now

Targeting Custom Audiences

In the past, advertisers have had to rely on demographics & affinities provided by Google, or past online actions to target users in AdWords. Customer Match allows advertisers to now create and target a custom user audience simply by uploading a list of email addresses. This will allow advertisers to serve different ads or cater their bids for users at different stages of their purchase journey – whether they’re a hot new lead, an existing customer, or a frequent buyer. So long as you have their email address, Customer Match allows you to reach them on Search, Gmail, or YouTube.

Google also announced that advertisers can upload these audiences and generate Similar Audiences to reach users with similar demographics and online behavior as the customers in their existing audiences. Similar audience targeting has been available on the Google Display Network for a while and has potential to increase the reach of your lists by 5x-10x!

Users visit your site and get added to your Remarketing list. Then show them Customised Ads when they search on Google.

Targeting custom audiences by uploading your existing email marketing list is already a powerful tool for Facebook and Twitter advertisers and is also expected to help advertisers who are currently using Content Remarketing, Gmail Sponsored Promotions, or Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) by giving them the ability to serve a specific bid or ad to users more actively considering purchasing or who may have originally converted offline.

The AdWords Customer Match Rate is AMAZING

Customer Match is a new targeting option that allows advertisers to create custom audiences for their AdWords campaigns based on email lists that they can upload directly to AdWords.

Wordstream tested this new functionality and considers that this is without a doubt THE most exciting AdWords update in the history of the platform.

They uploaded around 357,000 customer emails to AdWords to test Customer Match’s accuracy. This data was encrypted prior to upload to protect customer privacy. Based on this uploaded list, Google determined that approximately 180,000 of the contacts we uploaded were using Google products. Based on this data, we determined that, in this experiment, Customer Match had a match rate of 50.4% !

Comparing the match rate of the exact same list uploaded to AdWords with Facebook and Twitter’s match rate, AdWords was marginally higher than Facebook and completely crushed Twitter’s match rate! Facebook Custom Audience match was 49.0% while Twitter Tailored Audience match was 10.2%.

AdWords Customer Match does an incredible job of matching advertisers’ email lists with customers using Google products. It’s even better than Facebook and pretty much puts Twitter to shame.

While Google and Facebook were almost the same, it’s worth noting that the results may vary depending on the size of the list you upload, as well as other factors – in your tests, Facebook may well perform better than Google. Either way, both Google and Facebook are excellent platforms for identity-based marketing.

What’s most interesting isn’t necessarily the absolute number of matches (though that’s still pretty exciting), but rather the relative match rate comparison between two identical customer lists across the various platforms. Google has proven that its customer matching is extraordinarily powerful.

Why AdWords Customer Match is So Exciting

Wordstream says this is the most important and exciting update to AdWords ever. This not only allows advertisers to target prospects more efficiently, it also represents a fundamental shift in how AdWords is evolving to meet the needs of advertisers in today’s marketplace.

Today, social and display offer the ability to target with near-surgical precision, with ads tailored for conversion using data like:

Identity – emails and even phone numbers
Remarketing – people who visited the “buy” page of your website
Interests & Market Segments – photography, business interests
Keyword targeting – articles, press releases, blogs
Website targeting – magazines.

Identity-based marketing empowers companies to speak directly to consumers with highly personalized, timely and relevant messaging. See real use cases, as well as tips and tricks you can put into practice today to tap into this super powerful marketing trend.

This just goes to show how seriously Google is taking targeting options. Custom audiences are the most powerful aspect of paid social, and it’s thrilling to see AdWords going in this direction, too.

‘Similar’ Audiences

Something else that advertisers should be psyched about is Customer Match’s Similar Audience functionality. This allows you to find new prospects based on parameters identified in their uploaded lists, even if they haven’t interacted with your site. In the example above, the match rate was over 50%, equalling a potential audience of 180,000 people. By using Similar Audiences, we can effectively double our reach and target customers who share similar characteristics.

For advertisers running both PPC and paid social campaigns, AdWords’ Customer Matching is the perfect logical progression. Since custom audiences are part of what makes paid social so powerful, it’s amazing that advertisers can apply these same strategies to their AdWords campaigns, too.

This content is based on blogs written by Wordstream Inc.

Call us NOW on 027 489 5009 or email chris@pattersondigitalmarketing.com to seek our help to use Customer Match and Similar or Custom Audiences from either Google AdWords or Facebook to double /triple the reach of your customer base and gain more customers and sales.

Chris Kirkham