About Customer Match

Customer Match is a useful advertising tool for many business goals, from increasing brand awareness to driving conversions. Here are a few examples of different audiences that you can target with Customer Match:

• On the Search Network and the Shopping tab, you can optimise your campaigns by adjusting your bid based on what you know about your customers’ activities.
• On Gmail, you can reach your customers or new potential customers with similar interests using personalised ads at the top of their inbox tabs.
• On YouTube, you can reach new segments, by targeting segments similar to your most valuable customers.
• On Display, you can reach your customers or new potential customers with similar interests using personalised ads on the Google Display Network.

This article explains how Customer Match works. You can also read more in Your guide to Customer Match. There are several recent updates that impact how Customer Match works. You can read more about those updates below.

Before you begin

Campaigns using Smart Bidding and optimised targeting automatically include all the Customer Match lists in your account to enhance your ad campaign performance for your goals, such as conversions. If you don’t want your Customer Match lists to be automatically used to improve your campaign's performance, you can either:

• Opt out of auto-including unapplied Customer Match lists that are accessible to your account by following these steps.
• Remove specific lists that you don’t want to use in Smart Bidding and optimised targeting from your account.

Bear in mind that:

• This won't affect the targeting settings for your campaign. For example, if your campaign uses optimised targeting, your ads will be shown to users who are more likely to convert.
• Even if your Customer Match lists aren’t relevant to all your campaigns, Smart Bidding and optimised targeting will automatically learn which Customer Match lists are helpful to your campaign's performance and continuously optimise list application in real-time.
• Customer Match lists won’t be used if you’re using manual bidding strategies.
• Customer Match lists have a maximum membership duration of 540 days. Any list memberships added or refreshed more than 540 days ago will no longer be eligible. To stay eligible, a list must have at least 100 members added or updated within the last 540 days. We recommend regularly refreshing your Customer Match lists. You can refresh your Customer Match lists through several methods, including continuous syncing with third-party CRMs or manual uploads.
• Auto-inclusion of unapplied Customer Match lists in Smart Bidding or optimised targeting is available for YouTube, YouTube video action campaign and will soon be available for in-feed ads and search ads.

Timeline for untargeted Customer Match lists to be auto-included is as follows:

If you’re ready to upload your Customer Match data, learn how to create a customer list.

Learn more About the customer matching process.

How it works

Let's say that you want to advertise a new loyalty programme to your existing customers with Google ads. Here's how it works:

You create and upload a customer list data file of contact information that your customers have given you. Use this template and check this article for formatting instructions.	You create or update a campaign to target your Customer Match segment – customers from your uploaded data file who are Google users.	When those users are signed in to their Google Account, they come across your ads when they use the Search Network, YouTube and Gmail or when they browse on the Google Display Network.

For more information about how Google uses the data files that you upload for Customer Match and how the matching process works, read How Google uses Customer Match data.

User choice and control

Google users can control the ads that they see on Google services, including Customer Match ads, in their Google Ads Settings.

Recent updates to Customer Match

Related links

• How Google uses Customer Match data
• Create a customer list
• Customer Match policy
• Your guide to Customer Match
• Customer Match audience (Display & Video 360)