Customer Match
Customer Match lets advertisers upload their own customer data to Google Ads to reach, exclude or find people similar to existing customers.
What is Customer Match?
Customer Match is a Google Ads feature that lets advertisers use their own customer data – email addresses, phone numbers or postal addresses – to reach those customers across Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, Discover and the display network. The data is hashed before upload, and Google matches it to signed-in Google accounts.
Typical uses:
- Targeting existing customers with cross-selling, upselling or loyalty campaigns.
- Excluding customers from acquisition campaigns, so you don’t pay to win people you already have.
- Signals for AI campaigns: your lists help Performance Max, Demand Gen and Smart Bidding find similar new customers.
- B2B: reaching known contacts and target accounts, for example in account-based marketing.
Lists can be uploaded manually or synced automatically from CRM systems. Accounts must meet Google’s policy and eligibility requirements, and match rates depend on data quality – business email addresses usually match less often than personal ones.
Customer Match is one of the most valuable uses of first-party data, but it requires a legal basis. For people in the EU, you must have their consent to share their data with Google for advertising, in line with the GDPR and Google’s EU user consent policy. Make sure your forms and privacy policy cover this before you upload lists. Microsoft Advertising and LinkedIn offer comparable list-based targeting.