September 28, 2015: Facebook pioneered Custom Audiences, launching its product in 2013. It’s since been joined by Twitter, and yesterday, by Google, which announced a new product called “Customer Match” in a 9/27/15 blog post:
“Customer Match is a new product designed to help you reach your highest-value customers on Google Search, YouTube, and Gmail — when it matters most. Customer Match allows you to upload a list of email addresses, which can be matched to signed-in users on Google in a secure and privacy-safe way. From there, you can build campaigns and ads specifically designed to reach your audience.”
Google’s announcement will likely be welcomed by marketers seeking to make better use of their e-mail lists. Custom audiences help marketers leverage the investment they’ve made over the years in terms of aggregating email addresses from customers, prospects, and those who’ve opted into their publishing environments thorugh newsletter sign-up. For example, B2B marketers often make use of webinars, podcasts, and ebooks to obtain email addresses. B2C marketers make extensive use of coupons, POS displays, and other mechanisms to build such lists.
Custom Audiences are also very useful for remarketing/retargeting, avoiding ad burnout, and broadening campaign reach through LookAlike audiences — a feature that Google’s product will include (Lookalike Audiences are audiences whose members share similar characteristics with those uploaded by the marketer).
While many details about the Customer Match product have yet to be released, it is likely that Google’s product will work similarly to Custom Audience products already deployed by Facebook and Twitter. In other words, the same general rules and best practices will apply, the most important being:
1. Ensuring that any e-mail lists you upload have been truly opted into by those who are on it. It’s hard to imagine that Google will be any more tolerant with “scraped” email addresses than Facebook has been.
2. Segmenting your lists in advance to identify the different kinds of customers you want to target. While it’s possible that Google will allow marketers to modify the lists they’ve uploaded after being submitted to Google, it’s still a best practice to maintain clean, discrete lists with no overlap.
If you want to learn more about Custom Audiences, please download our free eBook: Using Facebook Custom Audiences to Improve Ad Performance.
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