Search giant Google is currently rolling out Customer Match, which enables AdWords advertisers to upload lists of email addresses to Google, which can then be matched to signed-in users. Customer Match is available for Google Search, YouTube and Gmail. Signed-in users visiting those websites can be served with targeted messages based on advertisers’ own data. “Customer Match represents the biggest change to Google AdWords in a decade,” noted Michael Carney, MD of the NZ online trai
ning provider Netmarketing Courses, “and it’s a new offering that can dramatically improve the effectiveness of AdWords efforts.
“Now you can finally use whatever you already know about your customers – such as when they last shopped with you, how often they shop and how much they spend – to really target your messages through AdWords.
“Customer Match is a service that advertisers have been begging Google to offer for years, ever since Facebook introduced Custom Audiences so successfully. Facebook’s email-matching capability has been a massive hit with advertisers and we expect the same success with Google Customer Match.”
Customer Match goes a long way towards solving one of the biggest challenges facing marketers today: how to track consumers across devices. As more and more Kiwis use smartphones, tablets and desktop machines interchangeably, the problem is only going to get worse.
Facebook coined the phrase “people-based marketing” to describe the new capabilities made possible by email-matching. Google’s Customer Match simply extends the concept across search, email and video.
