There are now more ways for businesses to target their known customers with AdWords campaigns. As of this month, Google gave advertisers the ability to upload phone numbers and mailing addresses for Customer Match retargeting and similar audiences.
Customer March launched in 2015, and allowed marketers upload lists of customers or other proprietary lists into Google AdWords to target, or exclude, search and display ads to those users. Until now, the only thing Customer Match supported was email list uploads.
Just like with email data, Google tries matching phone number and mailing address information with user-provided data in Google accounts.
Hashed email addresses and phone numbers are matched with Google’s own hashed to find matches. These matches are then added to marketers’ Customer Match lists.
For mailing address matching, Google says it “joins hashed name and address data for Google accounts to construct a matching key. After you’ve uploaded your list with hashed customer names and addresses (don’t hash zip and country data), Google constructs a similar key based on your data and then compares each key on your list with the keys based on Google accounts. If there’s a match, Google adds the corresponding Google account to your customer list.”
The following Google illustration shows how Customer Match works from the back end:
Advertisers have the ability to use Customer Match for targeting those customers across all Google properties, including search text and shopping ads, display, YouTube and Gmail. These lists can even be used to create similar audiences for targeting on Gmail and YouTube campaigns.
Users will be able to upload phone and mailing lists via the AdWords API or in the new AdWords interface. You can find the Audience Manager in the Shared Library, which can be found by clicking on the wrench icon in the upper-right navigation.
With the simple addition of mailing lists and phone numbers can really help open up a number of opportunities for marketers that don’t have large sets of email addresses to leverage their own first-party data in Google campaigns.