The long awaited full release of Customer Match for Google Shopping came along with another anticipated feature Similar Audiences.
Both contribute to the potential for enhanced Remarketing efforts, and all retailers can begin taking advantage of them.
Google, somewhat quietly we might add, announced the release of both features yesterday afternoon. The email announcement of Inside AdWords – EN did not come until very early the next day (today).
Customer Match for Google Shopping
We originally posted about Customer Match in November of last year, and at the time it was still in BETA. Now with the global rollout, retailers can begin submitting collected email lists from previous shoppers and retarget them.
Retailers should be aware that there are some specific policies outlined by Google regarding Customer Match.
Customer Match is not only available for Google Shopping. Advertisers and store owners can also employ Customer Match remarketing in Search, YouTube, and Gmail ads.
What we do know so far is that Google will absorb the list provided and seek out Google accounts and mark them as being eligible for the audience. As an “Audience,” Customer Match should work very similarly to RLSA in that once a list has been uploaded and matched, the subsequent audience built from it can be added to campaigns in AdWords.
We also venture to guess that the list of emails will need to be quite large, similar to how one would build Lookalike audiences for Facebook Advertising.
Similar Audiences for Google Shopping
It has been about a year since Google first intrigued the AdWords community about Similar Audiences, and now they are officially here.
What exactly are Similar Audiences? It’s quite simple really. Utilizing whatever pre-existing Audiences one may have in AdWords, Google will build “Similar to” lists which can be added campaigns just as with RLSA.
They are essentially automated lists which can be used to capture the eyes of potential shoppers quite like those who already belong to pre-existing audiences. For retailers this can range from All Visitors to All Converters and Add To Cart audiences.
Just as with all Remarketing lists, Similar Audiences are built only from those with at least 1,000 unique cookies, however those captured in Similar Audiences also must have similar search behavior as well.
After seeing this list you very may be wondering what “Unavailable” means:
“Only website tag and rule-based remarketing lists can be used to generate similar audiences. In some cases, there isn’t enough information to generate a similar audience list. In these cases, the list may appear as “Unavailable” in the Shared Library.”
What We Are Seeing So Far
While it may be a bit too early to tell much about what to expect, we are seeing Similar Audiences all throughout retailer campaigns.
Website traffic is the number one factor here and smaller shops may not see the most tremendous of results. Larger retailers and those with significant traffic could be able to attract an astronomical number of new shoppers. As compared to the image above, we looked at a major retailer in the auto parts sector and found some very interesting results:
Google is projecting that in “Similar to All visitors” alone there are millions of opportunities to increase revenue and boost return shopper rates.
We’ll be testing Similar Audiences for Google Shopping over the course of the year and will be back with some research studies for both large and small retailers.