How To Target Ads By Email Address In Google AdWords Using Customer Match

An effective Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign can be an extremely useful way to promote your business and appear in front of your ideal customer.

Perhaps one of the most effective ways to do this is to target your ads by email addresses in Google Adwords.

If you have not yet heard of “Customer Match” with Google, it’s time that you are introduced to it.

First of all, it’s an incredible feature that can drastically help you target custom audiences by simply uploading your email marketing list to Google. If this sounds like something you’ve heard of before, it’s likely because you have. Facebook and Twitter are already using custom audience targetting and Google is the latest to join them.

With Customer Match on Google, you can upload your customers and other promotional email lists to AdWords and target those specific audiences. The feature will undoubtedly help you engage customers with the highest value to you on Google itself in addition to YouTube and Gmail.

Here’s how it works: simply upload the email addresses that you have acquired, create a campaign to target your audience, and when those people are signed into their Google account, your ads will now be visible to them across Google’s platforms. We’d say that’s pretty cool!

So, how do you set this up and start targetting the most relevant and valued people to your business? Here is a step-by-step guide on how to get started.

1. Accessing your list in AdWords

Sign into your Google AdWords account. From your Campaigns dashboard, click on “Shared Library” on the menu on the left. Next, under the “Shared library” tab, click “Audiences” to access a list of remarketing options.

Once you do this, click on “Create a list” under the “Customer Emails” tab.

2. Setting up your email list

Now it’s time to set up your email list. On this page, you will give your list a name and enter your customer list. You have two ways to do this: directly uploading customer email addresses or selecting customers from a previous audience that you set up. You will have to upload your email list in a .CSV file that is no larger than 5GB per upload.

You can also select whether you want certain emails on your list to expire after a set number of days. To do this, simply check the circle under the “Memberships” tab and enter the number of days you want an email to be removed from the list in. The default membership duration is set at the maximum.

Once your list is uploaded and you are happy with the settings you have chosen, click “Upload and save list”. Note that it may take some time for the list to upload on Google – up to 3 hours sometimes – so don’t be alarmed if you don’t see it immediately.

3. Add your new audience to a campaign

Now that you have successfully uploaded your customer email list, it’s time to add the list to your campaign. Depending on the type of campaign you’d like your Customer Match audience to be shown, the methods for activating the audience are slightly different.

For Search campaigns, you can add your Customer Match audience to a campaign by selecting “Search Network only” or “Search Network with Display Select”. For YouTube campaigns, you can add it by clicking “Online video” campaign, and for Gmail ads, you can add your audience to a “Display Network Only” campaign.

If you’re starting a new campaign, this can be done by going to the “Campaigns” tab and creating a new campaign. From here, select the campaign type that you want to create and follow the subsequent steps for ad creation. Once you’ve selected your campaign settings, created an ad group, and created your ad, click on your new campaign.

The next step is to be done for new ads and for those who want to add a customer match list to an existing campaign.

Click on the campaign you want to add your customer match list to. From here, click on the “Audiences” tab. Make sure the “Remarketing” subtab is selected and then click the red button “+ Targeting”.

Select the campaign that you want your audience to be added to. Under the “Targeting” tab, select “Interests & Remarketing” and choose the list(s) that you want to include. Once you are satisfied with your selections, click to save.

You’re done! You can now begin targeting users with your very own customer email list. Google’s Customer Match is a very effective way to display your ads to people on your list anytime they are signed in to their Google account.

To learn more about Google Ads and the difference between it and AdWords Express, you can check out our last blog post!

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