New features launched by Google for businesses to address and target their regular customers with AdWords campaign. Now advertisers can mention their contact details- phone number and mailing address to re-target known customers and similar audiences.

In 2015, Google launched Customer Match feature, which would enable business advertisers to upload list of customers and other proprietary lists, such as, newsletter subscribers into Google AdWords. It allowed them to target search and display ads to those users. Till now, it only supported email list uploads. However now, phone number and mailing address are included.

In case where matching is conducted based on the email data, Google tries to match phone number and mailing address information with user-provided data in Google accounts.

Hashed email addresses and phone numbers are matched up with Google’s own hashed strings to find matches. The matches are then added to marketers’ Customer Match lists.

Google says mailing address matching “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.”

Have a look at Google illustration of how Customer Match works from the back end:

Features Added For Google Customer Match Targeting

Customer Match may be used by advertisers to target matched customers across all Google properties, such as search text, shopping ads, display, YouTube and Gmail. The feature may also be used to create list of similar audiences for targeting on YouTube and Gmail campaigns.

AdWords API or the new AdWords interface can be used to upload phone and mailing lists. The Audience Manager is located in the Shared Library section, which can be accessed by clicking on the wrench icon in the upper-right navigation.

Greater opportunities arise for marketers with the addition of phone numbers and mailing addresses, especially for those who don’t have large sets of email addresses to leverage their own first-party data in Google campaigns.

Author

Ritu from PageTraffic is a qualified Google Ads Professional and Content Head at PageTraffic. She has been the spear head for many successful Search Marketing Campaigns and currently oversees Content Marketing operations of PageTraffic in India.