Google Ads AI Essentials: Customer Match Best Practices

About Customer Match

Customer Match enables you to use your online and offline first-party data to scale your reach and engagement with new and existing customers across Google’s surfaces including Search, the Shopping tab, Gmail, YouTube, and Display. 

Your customer data helps Google AI optimize bidding and audience strategies to deliver higher performing, more personalized campaigns to the most relevant customers. For example, when advertisers applied Customer Match list signals to campaigns, this resulted in a 5.3% conversion uplift¹. Some ways Customer Match can help you deepen existing customer relationships and build new ones include:

• Cross-sell your existing customers with another product or service they may like.
• Reach your existing customers with special offers and messaging.
• Reactivate dormant customers.
• Find new customers that are similar to your best customers.

As we move towards a cookieless world, Customer Match lists will enable you to continue reaching your most valuable customers and will be an important tool to help you manage your audiences, in addition to tag-based website visitors. 

Follow these best practices below to improve your customer engagement with Customer Match.

Use your existing first-party data to maximize list size

• Upload all available types of first-party data from your customers—like email address, mobile device, phone number, and physical address—in the right format to create the largest possible audience list size.

  Tip

  Using a verified Customer Match upload partner streamlines the manual work of uploading your customer list. It also allows you to add additional information, which can greatly increase match rates and list size.

  When customer information is uploaded to Google, the data is hashed—turned into encrypted codes—and matched with codes of Google accounts. After the codes go through the matching process, they are deleted immediately. Whether there is a match or not, Google does not keep this data or use it for any other Google product. Learn more about how Google uses Customer Match data in a privacy-safe way.

• Use match rate as a benchmark to diagnose potential data formatting issues: Match rate is the percentage of your upload that was able to be connected to Google’s logged-in users so you can see how much of your list is usable. Don’t be concerned if you don’t have a 100% match rate—it is common to have customer information that isn't matched. Use it as an indicator of how much of your data is viable and formatted correctly.

  Tip

  Most advertisers' match rates are between 29% and 62%. To improve your match rate, make sure you're formatting and encrypting your list properly.
• Include multiple sources of customer information in the same row of your data file: Doing this ensures you will get the most accurate match rate in Google Ads. For example, when you have a phone number and an email address from the same customer, put them in the same row side by side (as shown in row 2 and row 5).
  

Find new audiences

• Enable the new customer acquisition goal in Google Ads: This AI-powered approach uses your existing customer lists to identify and reach new customers. You can simply select your customer lists and set your customer acquisition value and your campaign will optimize towards new consumers. 
• Create Customer Match lists from leads with lead form audiences: Lead form audiences automatically populate with users that have submitted information to your lead form assets. You can create, manage, and use segments based on your form responses.

Keep lists fresh for optimal performance

• Update Customer Match lists frequently: When you don’t update your lists, they become stale, which limits the amount of information Google can work with to find your relevant audience and deliver more optimized campaigns. Here are the ways you can update your lists:

  Update Method	Best Practice
  Manual uploads in Google Ads	Set a calendar reminder to update lists at the same day/time each week
  API	Automate your upload process to append to lists at least once per day
  Customer Match upload partner	Work with an upload partner to make it it easier to refresh lists frequently
  Third-party automated solution (for example, Zapier)	Set up a “Zap”, which will update lists automatically in real time (get started)
  Conversion-based customer lists	Go to Account Settings and check the box next to "Turn on conversion-based lists"

• Use enhanced conversions with Customer Match to auto-generate customer lists based on your goals: By implementing enhanced conversions and enabling conversion-based customer lists, customer segments specific to your business will be automatically generated based on your conversion goals and updated in real-time. This means customer lists will stay more up-to-date and will require no effort from you.

Use your lists to drive campaign optimization 

• Use your Customer Match lists with AI-powered Smart Bidding and optimized targeting to improve performance: Smart Bidding and optimized targeting automatically use signals from your Customer Match lists to enhance your campaign performance for your goals, such as conversions.
  With Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policies, your Customer Match segments may be impacted on iOS 14+ traffic (including the use of these segments for exclusions). Customer Match segments on iOS 14+ are only compatible with signed-in users on mobile web Safari.

Customer Success Story

ImmoScout24, a popular real estate website in Germany, wanted to better refine their audience strategy and improve campaign performance using first-party customer data. After improving their overall tagging setup, uploading their customer data, and adopting Customer Match across all of their Google Ads accounts, they were able to see a 52% increase in conversion rate and 15% lower cost-per-acquisition. 

Video Resources

Meet the Expert: Customer Match and the privacy-safe future of audiences  

1. Google Data, Global, Ads, Jan 2021 - Dec 2022