Reach your most valuable customers with Customer Match

Did you know that you can reach past website visitors and app users? Let's say you’re a travel brand. You can now reach people who have joined your rewards program as they plan their next trip. For example, when these rewards members search for “non-stop flights to new york” on Google.com, you can show relevant ads at the top of their search results on any device right when they’re looking to fly to New York. And when those members are watching their favorite videos on YouTube or catching up on Gmail, you can show ads that inspire them to plan their next trip.

Behind the scenes, this works by adding people to a UserList.

Prior to v201509 there were four different types:

  • BasicUserList: Remarketing to people who took specific actions (such as purchasing shoes) on your website or app.
  • RuleBasedUserList: Remarketing to people who follow advertiser-defined rules. The rule can be as simple as all visitors to your website (which is the easiest way to start remarketing).
  • LogicalUserList: Combining two or more user lists. For example, customers who purchased shoes and/or visited specific pages of your website at specific times.
  • SimilarUserList: Remarketing to people that share similar interests and behaviors with those in other user lists. For example, you can reach new potential customers that share similar interests and behaviors with those who purchased shoes on your website.

A SimilarUserList is automatically created by Google for each UserList based on a variety of factors, such as the number of people on the original list, how recently these people joined the original list, the types of sites that these people browsed and whether the original list is your own. This process may take up to 4 days once the seed list is created.

You can target or exclude user lists at the ad group level, but you can only exclude them at the campaign level.

As a reminder, please have a look at the policy for advertising based on interests and location and the policy for remarketing lists for search ads.

Customer Match

v201509 introduced a new user list type: CrmBasedUserList. It enables you to create a user list using your customers’ email addresses.

Suppose you have an existing database of email addresses of your newsletter subscribers for “people who love shoes”. With a CrmBasedUserList you can reach these subscribers and adjust your bidding accordingly, present different ads, and more. You can use a SimilarUserList of your subscribers list to potentially find new customers who share similar behaviors and interests.

Each CrmBasedUserList must have an optOutLink to provide a link to the page where people can manage their preferences for receiving email messages from the advertiser, including opting out of the advertiser email messages.

Before using this targeting strategy, please take the time to read our policy page.

A CrmBasedUserList can be used for targeting on the Search network, YouTube and Gmail, whereas a SimilarUserList of a CrmBasedUserList can only be used for targeting on YouTube and Gmail.

Keep the following points in mind when using a CrmBasedUserList:

  • Advertisers must collect email addresses as 1st party. For example, an agency can submit email addresses on behalf of an advertiser if the advertiser collected the email addresses directly from its customers.
  • Email addresses can be from Gmail or non Gmail addresses as long as they are associated with a Google account. We recommend adding all available email addresses to maximize the size of the result.
  • Ads will serve only when the user list has at least 1,000 active members. Active members are those who have used Google Search, YouTube, or Gmail at least once over the last 30 days.

If you want to read more about CrmBasedUserList, have a look at our guide and code examples.

As always, feel free to visit us or ask questions on the AdWords API Forum or our Google+ page.

, AdWords API Team