One of the coolest features Google AdWords released towards the end of last year was the “AdWords Customer Match” lists for Retargeting. Ok it is not as good as Facebook’s Email look alike feature but still it can be extremely powerful, especially for companies that offer various types of account upgrades or Product trials.
I will use as an example for this post an imaginary scenario.
You are in charge of PPC accounts for a spread betting or FX company who tend to promote both Demo and Live accounts. Because bidding for those keywords can kill your budget quickly (if i remember correctly CPC is around £50) you are targeting Demo related keywords which are not only cheaper but also have a higher conversion rate since it is risk free and people find it easier to sign up.
Your 7 days automated email campaign has just ended and the live accounts dont kick in. Consequently the Demo to live attribution is going down, your CPA is increasing and your call center simply can not call everyone. Here is where the AdWords customer match can help you.
What is AdWords Customer Match
Adwords customer match is a new remarketing list (after website, mobile app and YouTube visitors) you can use on Search campaigns in order to target users that you already hold their email address. It can be found on the Re-marketing list and it is super valuable as you are targeting audience you have engaged at some point, in our case the registered for a demo account users.
You need to go to your CRM and extract a CSV with all email addresses, then upload this file to your adwords account and create your new audience. If the user is logged in with their GMail address, Google will retarget them with the new message on specific keywords you will select, similar to RSLA.
This can be used for all types of campaigns. If it is an acquisition campaigns, then in our example you can target all the users who have a demo account but haven’t upgraded to live.
You can be more creative and target active clients who already have a live account with you and are about to enter your Churn rate segment with re-activation messages, or loyal clients to inform them about trading opportunities so they can log in and trade (this is how a spread bet company makes money).
In order to create your audience, you will need to upload a list of email addresses with only one address per line. Your list can contain hashed or unhashed addresses, but not headers or multiple tabs.
Example:
example@gmail.com
email@example.com
example@example.com
email@gmail.com
Once you do that, you will need to set an Email opt-out link and ofcourse the membership duration (maximum 180 days).
Once your audience is ready:
- create your ad copies
- select your new keywords (Similar to RSLA, this is a search campaign only)
- publish the campaign
That’s it really, your audience will be now targeted with your new message next time they are on google and logged in with their gmail account.
Make sure that your file is no bigger than 17MB and despite the fact that the user needs to be logged in to GMAIL, Google is doing a great job in targeting even those who use a different account (example: company account).
Happy Re-marketing.
