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Understanding Customer Match

Understanding Customer Match

When using first party data in digital advertising, the process of matching is an important thing to understand.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does customer match mean?

Customer match is the process of taking your customer data (1st party data) and matching it with customers of the system you are sending the data to.

For instance, if you are sending customer data to Facebook for matching, Facebook will try to match your customers with Facebook users to find those that match - hence the term “customer match”.

Each of the DSPs provide details on their customer match (or equivalent, but differently named):

There is also some added information in this documentation about each destination - including those which are used for Customer Match: Destination Types

What is the Match Rate?

When you upload customer lists to an advertising platform, often you will be provided information about the “match rate”. This is a measure of the percentage of matches between your customers and the advertising platform’s customers.

If all of the customers that you upload can be found as customers in the advertising platform, then you would have a 100% match rate - this is rarely the case. Often match rates vary between 20% and 60%.

What impacts this is hard to say in a lot of cases, but we have a little playbook to allow you to experiment and dial in on what in your data affects the match rate in a particular advertising platform: Understanding First Party Data Addressability

What can I do with these audience lists?

Some interesting use cases are enabled from using first party data in advertising platforms, such as:

  • Direct targeting:

    • for remarketing purposes

    • for re-engagement messaging

  • As exclusion lists

    • to ensure your acquisition campaigns are not targeting your existing customers

    • to limit your marketing to only those customer segments who are higher value (by excluding the low value customer segments)

  • As the basis for look-a-likes

Often you require a total of 1000+ MATCHED customers before you can use a list - - this varies between advertising platforms & use case.

How do I enable customer match?

Customer match often needs to be enabled in AdTech platforms before you are able to send data to them.

This is due to customer privacy & the fact that data processing agreements usually need to be in place between yourself as an advertiser and the platforms.

Some AdTech may also have eligibility criteria to allow you to use the functionality - this could range from time you have had an account for, quality of your account and spend over time.

The best place to look for this information is with the AdTech platform information themselves - the links above can be a good start. You might also want to ask any reps you have contact with within the AdTech platforms.

Ensure you are aware of your legal obligations to your customers and their data before using customer match.

Specific DSP Matching & usage

Each advertising platforms are likely to have nuances in their matching and targeting and where / how you can use these lists.

Google Ads

  • Allows you to use the lists in the following places (in most cases):

    • Google Search

    • YouTube

    • Google Mail

    • Google Display Network

  • Can be shared to Google Display & Video 360

  • Can be used for:

    • Direct targeting

    • Exclusion lists

    • As look-a-like seeds

  • Requires > 100 matched customers to SHOW the match rates

  • Requires > 1000 matches customers to allow you to use the lists

  • Google Ads will only allow you to target customers who have been active in the last 30 days within the platform you wish to use the list within (Search, YouTube, Google Mail or Google Display Network)

    General Match
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    Addressable (active) Audience
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