Google Customer Match Boosting Campaign Performance

Bids based on Probability

Google Customer Match allows advertisers to target their own customers when they are searching online. The results are highlighted in a case study featuring Wolford and UDG United Digital Group. Daniel Schetter explains how the feature works.

How does Customer Match work?
Daniel Schetter: Customer Match is a special remarketing feature that enables advertisers to target their own customers with ads in Google search. For this purpose they upload customer data gained through login or newsletter registration in their Google AdWords account. Google matches this with their own first-party information. For protection of data privacy, this feature is only available with more than a thousand data matches. You can’t use Customer Match to address the three people who bought pink socks the day before.

What’s the advantage of targeting existing customers in search?
Daniel Schetter: Generally, the click of an existing customer is of more value than that of an unknown user because the probability of him or her purchasing anything is higher. For Wolford we built target groups based on CRM data, and assigned different bids to them. Based on the keywords used, we also took into account which phase of the customer journey he/she was in.

How can you determine those phases?
Daniel Schetter: If somebody is searching for the brand or generic expressions, he/she hasn’t made up his mind yet or is still looking for some inspiration. When a query aims at a specific product and/or contains words like “buy,” it indicates a shopping need. For valuable users like this we have increased Wolford’s bids by up to 300 percent.

What was the effect?
Daniel Schetter: In search campaigns, this approach has improved the cost/revenue ratio (CRR) by a factor of 2.5, while in shopping there’s been a significant jump in conversion rate and the CRR has improved by a factor of 12.5. Today, 10 percent of all visitors to Wolford’s websites arrive via remarketing.

Why is Wolford so successful with its efforts?
Daniel Schetter: Wolford can profit a lot from targeting their customers with Customer Match because many advertisers bid on key words with a combination of brand name and product. As a manufacturer with their own online shop, the company competes with retailers for traffic without being able to underprice their commerce partners. By addressing their own customers, Wolford can solve this problem and configure their search engine advertising in an efficient way.

Which kind of companies can benefit the most of Customer Match?
Daniel Schetter: Almost all online retailers who approach customers in an advanced phase of the customer journey. We apply that feature to most of the e-commerce companies we work with – and those who have tested Customer Match are now using it permanently because of its significant impact.

For more information on the case study see „Think with Google“ (in German).