Google’s latest release lets you target customers closer than ever before

Earlier this month Google released Customer Match, a feature that allows businesses to advertise personalized content to individual users based on their email address. This provides groundbreaking targeting capabilities, as advertisers can now market custom content directly to an individual user.

By uploading a batch of opted-in customer email addresses to Google’s search properties, such as Adwords and YouTube, we can now serve up specific content based on search habits and observed behaviors. When these people are online, we target precise ads for products and services in which they’ve shown interest as they search and browse throughout Google’s network across different devices.

“This really has the potential to be a game changer,” said Chris Ramaglia, EVP of BroadBased Communications. “This type of targeting has never been available on Google and it presents some amazing opportunities for our clients because we know exactly who is viewing our ads.”

But for all of its potential, Customer Match is a feature that will need to be handled with some finesse. Personalized targeting has long been a controversial topic when it comes to Internet advertising, with some users feeling that it’s a breach of privacy for a website or platform to use your personal data to “follow” you around the Web.

That didn’t stop Facebook and Twitter from rolling it out, however, and the former is seeing tremendous success in 2015 with an expected $16 billion in ad revenues according to emarketer.com. That’s mainly due to the fact that on Facebook and other social networks, users are inherently identified based on their login and details in their profile, and their interests can be easily derived based on what they post and with whom they interact.

What makes Customer Match unique from social networks is Google’s massive reach, coupled with its robust user data, which has been extracted from trillions of searches. Google’s data about your users can be leveraged to up-sell, cross-sell, and launch new products and services.

“There’s so much potential in what this allows us to do from a digital marketing standpoint,” Ramaglia said. “It takes out the guesswork and allows us to help clients find the precise audience and deliver the perfect message.”

There are some requirements for a company to implement a Customer Match campaign, such as a minimum of 1,000 customer email addresses and proof that they’ve opted-in versus having been obtained from a purchased list. There are several ways to customize content, from text ad copy to display ad creative, as well as video.

When you’re ready to harness Google’s big data to convert more online lead and drive more business through your website, give our EVP Chris Ramaglia a call at (904) 398-7279 ext. 17 or email chris@bbased.com.