Google Announces AdWords Customer Match Targeting

Google took Times Center Stage Monday afternoon to announce two new products: Universal App Campaigns and the long-rumored Customer Match targeting to kick off Advertising Week in New York City.

In the past, advertisers have had to rely on demographics & affinities provided by Google, or past online actions to target users in AdWords. Customer Match allows advertisers to now create and target a custom user audience simply by uploading a list of email addresses. This will allow advertisers to serve different ads or cater their bids for users at different stages of their purchase journey – whether they’re a hot new lead, an existing customer, or a frequent buyer. So long as you have their email address, Customer Match allows you to reach them on Search, Gmail, or YouTube.

Google also announced that advertisers can upload these audiences and generate Similar Audiences to reach users with similar demographics and online behavior as the customers in their existing audiences. Similar audience targeting has been available on the Google Display Network for a while and has potential to increase the reach of your lists by 5x-10x!

Targeting custom audiences by uploading your existing email marketing list is already a powerful tool for Facebook and Twitter advertisers and is also expected to help advertisers who are currently using Content Remarketing, Gmail Sponsored Promotions, or Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) by giving them the ability to serve a specific bid or ad to users more actively considering purchasing or who may have originally converted offline.

Google announced that Customer Match will be rolling out to all advertisers over the next few weeks.

UPDATE: In November 2017, AdWords expanded Customer Match to include targeting by phone number and address.