This year, like last year, the big tech companies are all competing to see who can grab the most press at Advertising Week in New York. Google‘s contribution: a new addition to AdWords that will expand search targeting capabilities and help advertisers connect their offline customers with online ads.
The new Customer Match feature for AdWords that Google announced on Monday takes advertisers’ first-party email contact lists and uses them to identify logged-in Google users across search pages, Gmail and YouTube. If someone who’s been identified as a customer happens to do a search that advertiser is targeting, they can choose to bid extra on that customer.
That means that, for example, a past Air Canada passenger (who has provided their email address at some point) who searches for “flights from Toronto to Vancouver” will be more likely to see an Air Canada ad than someone who isn’t a customer that searches for the same term.
Joseph McConnellogue, Canadian managing director of IPG Mediabrands search and social agency Reprise Media, said he sees the launch as Google’s biggest step forward in search since it launched search remarketing two years ago.
“It really proves Google’s commitment to the evolution of audience targeting,” McConnellogue said. “It gives us an opportunity to figure out who is actually our customer, before the person even does the search. That really allows us to home in on our most valuable users.”
He expects Customer Match will be useful for virtually any type of campaign, since it can be layered on top of keyword targeting and remarketing tools that are already being used to find high-value audiences. When using Customer Match, bids will still be placed on users who aren’t tagged as known customers; Customer Match just tells the system to bid more if the searcher happens to be a customer, to make sure the advertiser secures the top ad spot.
Advertisers will now also be able target lookalikes — users who share attributes with customers on their contact list based on Google account activity. And they have the option to use dynamic ads that show different content to known customers (“Welcome back!”) versus those who aren’t (“Shop with us!”).
Guillaume Bouchard, CEO of Dentsu Aegis’ performance agency iProspect Canada, said the new product will give marketers greater depth of understanding when it comes to the purchasing habits of their customers. That means they can better target their messaging, and drive more efficient conversions.
“Obviously, CPC should decrease, as the relevance of customer queries to your business will increase,” Bouchard said. “It should also resolve a lot of issues with cross-device conversion tracking (the customers will no longer be matched using a cookie that is different on their mobile, but rather with their email address), and the attribution models will follow as well.”
“There are solutions like this out on the market, but ours is a little bit different,” said Google vice-president of product management for search marketing, Jerry Dischler. “We’re marrying the intent signal with the context signal, so rather than just targeting all of your customers, we’re targeting all of your customers who are looking for a particular query on Google.com. That gives it a lot more power.”
Privacy
He stressed that Google has factored in user privacy and transparency when using personally identifiable information like an email address for targeting. The matching will be done securely and anonymously on Google’s end. And to prevent spam, marketers will only be able to use contact lists they’ve collected themselves, not third-party lists they’ve bought from wholesalers.
Users that see a targeted ad can also click the “Why this ad?” button on any Google ad to learn about how they were targeted. From there, they can opt out of data collection and targeting. Ads that use Customer Match will have an additional option to visit the advertiser’s site and request to be removed from their contact list.
Google made a second announcement at Ad Week that app install campaigns designed in AdWords can now be extended across Google Search, YouTube, Google Play and Google Display Network (GDN). AdWords will auto-generate an ad for each channel based on Google Play assets from the app’s download page.
“We think this is a really disruptive way to access a large body of attractive app advertising inventory,” said Dischler. “What we’re hoping this will do is democratize app distribution by allowing more app developers to participate easily and quickly.”
