Google Customer Match Expands to Include Targeting by Phone Number & Address

Mark Irvine — December 4, 2017

— December 4, 2017

When Google first introduced Customer Match in 2015, it allowed search advertisers to create and target custom audiences based on a list of user email addresses in their Search, Gmail, and YouTube campaigns within AdWords. As advertisers discovered powerful best practices for using Customer Match, it became a sensation and Customer Match was expanded to Shopping Campaigns in 2016.

As great as customer match is though, not all advertisers have a large list of emails for their customers or prospects to target their ads. Even when they did, Google wasn’t able to match every email to a user on their network.

Introducing the New & Improved Customer Match

Just in time for the holidays, Google has expanded the way advertisers can target users with Customer Match – by matching them to their phone number or their address!

How to Use the New Expanded Customer Match Feature

Advertisers can now create a customer match audience that includes any combination of email addresses, physical addresses, and phone numbers and upload them into AdWords to target in their Search, Shopping, Gmail, and YouTube campaigns. You can upload these audiences through the audience manager in the New AdWords UI (which is now universally available) using either hashed or unhashed data. Google provides a complete guide to formatting and uploading this customer data here.

The expanded phone number and address targeting options for Customer Match in AdWords should allow more businesses to use their first-party customer data to reach more searchers. In addition to using their email marketing lists to improve their campaigns, they can now leverage their direct mail lists, their SMS campaigns, or even their message extensions to expand their customer match audiences! The more data you can provide on your users, the higher the likelihood that Google will be able to match your data to its users.

That additional targeting should excite advertisers, especially all of those who have already discovered the power of Google’s Customer Match. Today, advertisers already see that Customer Match Audiences outperform nearly every other type of audience on the Google SERP – so this expanded reach is more than welcome!