Your Customer Match match rate is the percentage of your uploaded customer list that could be connected to Google users, so you can find how much of your list is usable.
Bear in mind that your match rate is not an indicator of how your lists will perform, but rather an indicator of whether you’re uploading the right data in the right way.
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, read How Google uses Customer Match data.
How match rates are shown
You can create a customer data file based on the information shared by your customers (for example, customers who have signed up for your business’s newsletter, customers who have bought from you before that have churned, etc.). Your list will be uploaded by a secure hashing algorithm, turning the emails into codes that cannot be unencrypted. Google does not receive the actual email addresses, nor can Google view the contents of the list. Google accounts are also in hashed codes, and the codes are compared to determine if there’s a match.
After this process is done, your data file is deleted. Whether or not there’s a match, Google doesn’t keep this data or use it for any other purposes.
How it works
After you’ve created a customer list, you’ll be able to find your match rate in the file upload success page.
You can now view your match rate instantly in your Google Ads account, as well as the match rates of your previous uploads. You can find instant match rate percentages for the number of rows uploaded in each uploaded batch of files, as well as the ability to review all your uploads since 1 April 2020 and understand the upload statistics for those operations. We don’t show exact match rates. Your match rates will be grouped in a bucket and shown as a batch rate percentage.
The two common issues with Customer Match are upload problems and small reported Customer Match list sizes. Both can be traced to problematic data file formatting or incorrect hashing. Read Fix Customer Match issues with list upload, small list size or low volume.
List size can be smaller than you’d expect based on the match rate. This is because a match rate is the percentage of your uploaded customer list that could be matched to Google users, while a list size is an estimate of the number of users on a list that are reachable on a particular Google property through Google’s advertising products. A 'matched' Google user may not be reachable by personalised ads either because they opted out of ads personalisation or they’ve not been recently active on a given property such as Search in the last 30 days.
How to improve match rate
- To improve your match rate, we recommend adding as many match keys as possible. For example, email and phone number.
- Users who upload two match keys find an average list size increase by 28% and advertisers who upload a third match key find an average list size increase by 35%.
- To make this process even simpler, you can also work with a trusted Customer Match upload partner. Using a third party to upload your data is a good option because you can:
- Outsource list onboarding and refreshes instead of creating an in-house Google Ads API integration or using the Google Ads interface to upload.
- These companies don't need your Google Ads login credentials to upload your data.
- You can use additional first-party customer information, such as their postal address, phone number or alternative email, to increase your list size. These companies use proprietary identity maps to find emails corresponding to your customers’ phone numbers and postal addresses, and append these emails to your existing email list prior to performing the upload.
View your Customer Match match rate
- In your Google Ads account, click the Tools icon
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- 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 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.
- After your data has uploaded, you’ll find a file upload success page. You’ll view information about the number of rows that are successfully uploaded and your match rate percentage.
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