Launch Your Perfect Data-Driven Google Search Ad Campaigns with Customer Match

• Learn how to invest wisely and drive higher returns on Ad spends using accurate email data.
• Know why Google Customer Match using accurate customer email IDs is the best strategy.

If you’re planning to run Google campaigns, you’re not unfamiliar with data-driven attribution. Google itself considers it to be the future of marketing. And yes, it’s considered the best model as it uses actual customer data to credit for conversions.

Two of the most important benefits include targeting specific businesses to achieve conversion goals and targeting them at “critical sales moments.” These are also the best benefits in light of the fact that B2B targeting has always been a little tricky – how do you ensure that your ads reached the relevant audiences, not just individuals using the same keywords? Besides Google, even Microsoft has different tools and features that aim at making B2B targeting more personalized and precise.

Talking about Google, here are some specific tools offered to B2B marketers that can make their lives easier –

In-Market Audiences

What’s the best way to ensure a sale? Target buyers who are currently “in-market” or actively seeking products and services similar to what you offer. This feature is offered by Google as it allows you to exclusively target users who show the strongest buying signals using search history and present online behavior.

There are detailed sub-categories such as business event planning under business services or enterprise software under business software, and so on that help narrow your search to the most relevant prospects.

Google even offers the feature of ‘Custom Intent Audiences’ with specific keywords. What you do with this feature is use keywords exclusive to your business and audience, then identify and target those users who have a history of using these keywords. For instance – If you offer CRM software to enterprise-level organizations, you can use keywords that are centred directly on CRM and focused solely towards large organizations, thereby ensuring your ads are only presented before the relevant audience, even if they may not be actively seeking similar products at that time.

Detailed Demographics

This feature was introduced by Google back in 2018. Using this, you can target audiences based on their marital status, education level, home or car ownership status, parental stage, or employment category. This feature also allows you to target prospects based on the size and revenue of their company. Custom landing pages can be developed for different industries, and small and medium-sized companies can be targeted with messages different from that of large organizations. 

Similar Audiences, Remarketing, and Customer Match

One of the other ways that Google seeks to make B2B marketers’ lives easier is by letting them upload email lists or contact lists of their most valuable accounts. This feature enables extremely detailed targeting for remarketing audiences. Meaning, it makes it possible to target audiences based on a specific webpage they visited a week ago, the amount of time they spent on a particular landing page, and more.

Not only that, but Google will also create “similar audiences” based on these accounts. Once you’ve uploaded the list of your current high-value customers, Google will create a list of audiences that show similar characteristics based on their online behavior. This helps you widen your outreach.

Another useful feature is the ‘Customer Match’ using which you can upload your list of current opt-in customers and based on that, Google will match them to a Google profile. Once that’s done, you can target people on Gmail or YouTube with relevant ads.

Using Google Ads’ Customer Match: Why It’s the Ultimate Guide for Data-Driven Performance Marketing

Now that we’ve covered the basics of Google Customer Match, let’s understand what it can help you with as a B2B marketer –

• Upsell to existing customers – you can promote an add-on or maybe a new version of a previous product they have used.
• Directly target audiences who downloaded some sort of asset from your website, maybe an eBook, whitepaper, or case study.
• Offer exciting discounts and other offers that can attract prospects back to your website.
• Offer video ads to prospects on the top of the funnel, currently researching for similar products and services.
• Easily bridge the gap separating digital advertising with in-person activity.

In a nutshell, if you have valuable information about your target audience, Google’s Customer Match helps you to stay in front of them. However, this directly implies that you need a holistic view of your customers which includes 100% accurate information and comprehensive details – demographic, firmographic, and technographic.

Here’s Everything You Need to Know About Setting Up and Running a Successful Google Customer Match Campaign Using Your Customer’s Email Data.

Take a Walk-Through of a Customer Match Set-Up: It’s quick and easy

Step 1 – First, go to your shared library and from there, you need to select the ‘View’ option provided under the ‘Audiences’ section.

Step 2 – Now, from the remarketing list drop-down menu, choose ‘Customer Emails’ option.

Step 3 – For the third step, create a new customer email list. For this, be sure to use a descriptive title for naming the list based on the different attributes of your prospects. Once done, upload your customer email list in .csv format. The size of the list should not exceed 17 MB, which is nearly 500 email addresses. The addresses need not be Gmail; Google will as much work with other email addresses to give accurate match results.

Step 4 – The next step is to paste your email opt-out link (a mandatory step).

Step 5 – You will now have to set the duration of your membership. The default option is 180 days but you can change depending upon your sales cycle. It’s recommended to keep it on the long-term horizon to ensure that you’re catching up on lagging leads.

Step 6 – Now upload your list and save it. This step may take some time, especially if you’re uploading a large list (as much as 12 hours!).

Step 7 – Keep checking till your upload status changes from ‘In Progress’ to ‘Successful.’ You can now review the list details.

Step 8 – Now head to the ad group where you wish to implement your keywords, go to the audience tab and choose the remarketing option. Then, select the list that you want to target directly from the ‘Interests & Remarketing’ drop-down menu. This step is important as Customer Match needs to be layered on top of relevant keywords.

Step 9 – Finally, time to set your targeting. For this there are two options. ‘Target and bid’ to only those users whose names appear on the uploaded list or ‘bid only’ to show ads to people on the list as well as similar audiences who fit the criteria of additional targeting.

Whatever you choose, ensure that you don’t go overboard since it could erode the size of your current list. 

If you own an accurate leads database, Google Customer Match can be the game-changer in your digital marketing. So, start targeting a ‘single relevant user’ without the complexity of a programmatic platform.