How many of your current customers do you think you can target using Google Ads?
Don't know? Good news! Google can tell you.
Google will even tell you how many of your customers they can find on the Search Network, the Display Network, YouTube, and Gmail.
Crazy! Right? It's called Customer Match.
Customer Match allows you to use your customer data in your AdWords targeting. And today we are going to teach you how to use Customer Match.
In this post and video, we'll go inside AdWords and show you how to upload your customer lists. We'll also run a live Customer Match experiment. Our experiment will test Google's Customer Match results using customer emails vs. physical mailing addresses.
Follow along! And let's learn how we can use Customer Match to improve our efficiency and targeting in AdWords.
AdWords Customer Match
Building Adwords Customer Match lists
Creating your AdWords Customer Match list is pretty simple.
Let's walk through how to get your list set-up.
To get started, click the gear icon in the top right-hand corner of your AdWords dashboard.
Then, select audience manager from your Shared Library menu.
Next, click the blue "+" icon, and choose to create a customer list.
Once you're in the customer list screen, you can start to set up your new list. You can give your customer list a name. Then, choose to upload your list of customer emails, phone numbers and/or mailing addresses.
Matching customers by email address
To upload a list of customer emails you need to create a plain text file of email addresses. This file can be super basic. You only need one column, with the heading "email."
Once you have uploaded your list, Google will let you know if your customer emails are in the correct format.
Google was able to read 100% of the emails on my customer list!
After your list is in AdWords, Google will attempt to match your list with their targeting data. The matching process takes about 24 hours to complete.
Customer Match results for our email list
When Google's matching process is complete, you'll see results that look like this:
Google was able to match over 1/2 of the customers on my email list!
AdWords also provides you a report of where Google matches your customer data. They show you the number of customer matches they found on each of their networks.
The entire process of preparing my customer email list, and uploading it to Adwords took about 30 minutes. And the result, I now have an audience list that can make my advertising way more efficient.
Out of over 3,000 customers, I was able to match 50% of them with Google's data. I can target these customers with ads for new products. Or exclude them from future ad campaigns.
Building an AdWords Customer Match list using mailing addresses
Uploading a customer mailing address list requires some additional formatting. You need to include the first name, last name, country and zip code for each customer.
This list took me a bit longer to prepare than my simple email list. I had to work out few problems with my CSV file to get my list to upload correctly.
One area of note: You need to format your country column with the correct two-letter country code for each customer.
After I worked all the bugs out my CSV file, I had an address list of 4,199 customers from 97 different countries.
97 countries, wow! It's exciting to see that PPC Mastery Course has spanned the globe!!
Out of the 4,199 addresses I uploaded, Google was able to read 3,736 of them.
I was skeptical that Google would be able to match my customers using the data in my mailing address list.
The simple fields, name, country, and zip seem like they might generate a lot of false positives.
But, I was also excited to see the results of my experiment.
Customer Match results for mailing address list
Google matched approximately 24% of the customers on my mailing address list.
The volume of my customer matches across Google's networks was very consistent. Once again, Gmail had the highest match rate out of all Google's networks.
Demographic data for Customer Match lists
It took a while for Google to return the demographic data for my Customer Match lists. In fact, at the time I completed the above video Google still hadn't reported any demographic data for my lists.
Eventually, Google populated the demographic data for my customer email list. Google still hasn't returned any demographic data for my mailing address list. (Read full article)