Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) has increased the ways a business can target their customers with AdWords campaigns. Advertisers can now upload phone numbers and mailing addresses for the Google Customer Match retargeting and similar audiences.
Customer Match lets marketers upload lists of customers or other proprietary lists, such as newsletter subscribers, into Google AdWords to target, or exclude, search and display ads to those users. Essentially, it matches up customer emails with their phone numbers/mailing addresses.
Google explains that it uses Customer Match to join “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.”
Advertisers can use Customer Match to find those matched customers across all Google properties, such as search text, ads, YouTube, and Gmail.
Previously, Customer Match only supported email list uploads, meaning it wasn’t super beneficial to smaller advertisers that don’t possess a huge mailing list. Now, Google has just added in the ability to enter phone numbers or mailing addresses to Customer Match to be able to use it. This opens the door for those marketers and advertising companies that don’t have many emails collected from their customers but do have other customer information. This includes a catalog or call center sales. Now, these smaller advertisers can start using Google campaigns too.