With the deprecation of 3rd party cookies and other tracking technologies, marketers are looking more toward their first party data to optimize ads and create more efficient spend. Here are three ways you can leverage your first party data with Google Ads advertising.
Please consult your legal counsel before you use any first party data in advertising. This is not an article recommending how you should use first party data in advertising, rather it is an article outlining the ways that you could use first party data in advertising.
Customer Match
Launched in 2015, Google Ads provides Customer Match as a targeting option for advertisers across Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, and Google Display. When you upload your first party data to your Ads account, Google matches the data you provide against Google users. As an advertiser, you then have the opportunity to personalize ads and optimize bidding to increase your conversions. Whenever your customers sign into their Google accounts, they’ll then see any personalization you’ve applied.
Although applying your Customer Match segments used to be a manual process, as of 2022, Google now automatically includes Customer Match lists across any campaign that uses Smart Bidding.
In addition to using Customer Match to retarget your customers, historically you could also use them to target those users who aren’t your customers one of two ways. First, you could (and still can) upload prospects to Customer Match. The second method of using Customer Match to target non-customers – similar audiences – will be deprecated as of 2023.
Similar Audiences, often referred to as Similar Segments, was a feature built off the first party data in your Customer Match list. If your list was eligible, Google automatically created segments of users with shared interests or similar search behavior to the customers you’ve uploaded to the platform.
With the deprecation of similar audiences, Google is recommending advertisers opt for Audience Expansion and Optimized Targeting, released in 2019 and 2021, respectively. While Audience Expansion doesn’t use Customer Match lists, Optimized Targeting does. Optimized Targeting is a targeting feature that looks at attributes of converting customers to create a profile and target additional people based on that profile. While Google mentions they use conversion data and your landing pages to create this profile, an extensive list of the factors Google uses is unavailable. As such, consider this feature another black box of optimizations and targeting brought to you by Google.
First Party Data You Can Use With Customer Match:
- Phone
- First Name
- Last Name
- Mailing Address (First Name, Last Name, Country, Zip Code)
Examples of How to Use Your First Party Data With Customer Match:
- Re-engage dormant customers.
- Exclude existing customers from your campaigns
- Upsell or cross-sell existing customers
- Target across devices
Learn more: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6379332?hl=en
Offline Conversion Tracking
Offline Conversion Tracking became available in Google Ads in 2013 as a feature that allows you to better measure the impact of your Google Ads campaigns by importing – you guessed it – offline conversions. This feature worked one of two ways.
Offline Conversion Tracking via GCLID
The first way to utilize Offline Conversion Tracking is by storing and then importing back into Google Ads the gclid* attached to a website visit after a user completed a conversion. You can import this parameter back through a manual method or use one of Google’s partner integrations, such as Salesforce, Zapier, or Hubspot.
Offline Conversion Tracking via Phone Numbers
The second way to utilize Offline Conversion Tracking is through phone numbers. If you are using a Google forwarding number, Google then allows you to upload a file to capture any offline conversions that occurred via a phone call. This file contains the fields for a caller’s phone number, call start time, and conversion name and time.
First Party Data You Can Use With Offline Conversion Tracking:
- Gclid (Google Click ID)
- Phone Number
Examples of How to Use Your First Party Data With Offline Conversion Tracking:
- Optimize campaign assets, such as ad copy
- Optimize keywords
- Better understand the impact of your Google Ads campaigns on business goals (with a 90-day lookback window)
Learn more: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2998031?hl=en
Enhanced Conversions
Released in 2022, Enhanced Conversions is an additional feature Google offers that allows you to better measure the impact of your paid media campaigns by enhancing the data you send to Google Ads with first party data via your conversion pixel. Whether your pixel is deployed directly on the website or via a tag management solution, enhanced conversions allows you to scrape form fields to send to Google, where Google will then match the scraped data against one of two sources.
Enhanced Conversions for Leads
Enhanced conversions for leads is most similar to Google Ads’ Offline conversion tracking. When a user submits a lead form on your website, Google records the first party data you configured to be sent with your Google Ads pixel and stores it. Later, when your lead eventually converts, you upload the list of converted leads to Google. This list is referenced against the initial list of first party data collected.
This feature is separate from Google Ads’ Offline Conversion tracking in that it doesn’t require a gclid or a Google forwarding number. Another difference between Enhanced Conversions and Offline Conversion Tracking is the lookback window. While Offline Conversions has a lookback limit of 90 days, Enhanced Conversions doesn’t mention a lookback window at all. As a matter of fact, 30 days after you set up an automated feed of your leads through Enhanced Conversions, Google doesn’t tell you what percentage of your conversions came through your first party data vs. through your tracking pixels.
Enhanced Conversions for Web
Enhanced conversions for web works similarly to enhanced conversions for leads. When a user submits a lead form on your website, Google records the first party data you configured to be sent with your Google Ads pixel and stores it (please note – the word “stores” is used here because Google makes no mention in their documentation about deleting this data). However as opposed to enhanced conversions for leads, which matches this data against your first party data uploaded at a later date, enhanced conversions for web actually matches this data against all Google accounts.
Remember – your Google Ads pixels fire regardless of what traffic source a user comes from. By enabling first party data to be sent when your pixel fires, you’re now able to see users who interacted with your ads on different devices and ultimately converted, regardless of a user’s final traffic source.
First Party Data You Can Use With Enhanced Conversions:
- Phone
- First Name
- Last Name
- Mailing Address (Street, City, State, Zip Code)
Examples of How to Use Your First Party Data With Enhanced Conversions:
- Optimize campaign assets, such as ad copy
- Optimize keywords
- Take more credit for the impact your Google Ads campaigns are having on business goals (but less visibility into the customer journey)
Learn more: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9888656?hl=en-GB
Summary
Vidhya Srinivasan, Google’s VP and GM for Ads Buying, Analytics and Measurement said it best – “The future is consented. It’s modeled. It’s first-party.” If you’re considering using first party data in Google Ads advertising, you can take advantage of Google’s Customer Match, Offline Conversion Tracking, and Enhanced Conversions features.
Note: *For those who aren’t familiar – gclid stands for Google Click ID. It’s a query parameter attached to your landing page URL every time a user clicks on your ad. While the exact details of this parameter are unknown, similar to the fbclid, it stores information about who clicked, what was clicked, when it was clicked, and where it was clicked.