This month we take a look at using the new enhanced conversion-based customer lists in Google Ads, which is a follow up to our previous two blogs about enhanced conversions: New Google Ads Feature: Enhanced Conversions and Using Enhanced Conversions in Google Ads.
Enhanced conversions supplement existing conversion tags by sending encrypted first-party customer data (like email addresses) to Google, allowing it to match user interactions with your ads to actual conversions, even when cookies are blocked or disabled. Using these improves conversion measurement accuracy and unlocks more powerful bidding. (The data is hashed, Google can’t see its content).
Conversion-based customer lists is a feature that makes it easier to set up Customer Match by ticking a box in the Google Ads account settings. Using conversion-based customer lists helps to save time on managing and updating customer lists by automatically building lists using data provided by you for enhanced conversions.
When conversion-based customer lists are set up, the hashed user-provided data provided by you for enhanced conversions will also be used to build a customer list which helps to save time on managing and updating customer lists, as they are automatically built lists using data provided by you for enhanced conversions.
The standard requirement for Customer Lists in Google Ads is that any list must have at least 100 members added or updated within the last 540 days. This threshold hasn’t been stipulated for the new conversion-based customer lists, but we assume this remains the same, so will tend to work best with websites generating a large number of form-based leads.
Read how to create conversion-based customer lists.
Important: Conversion-based customer lists are available for those who have enabled enhanced conversions via tag-based implementations only. If you have implemented user-provided data in Google Analytics 4 (GA4), and opted into conversion-based customer lists in Google Ads, your goal-based audience lists will be populated with GA4 conversions.
Once opted-in, this feature automatically creates audience segments for each of the conversion goals where enhanced conversions are active. Opting in at the account level allows your input of data into one location that will be applied across your campaigns.
Using Customer Match improves your Smart Bidding and allows the use of customer lifecycle optimisation, such as new customer acquisition goals in Performance Max campaigns.
Once conversion-based customer lists have been set up, they will automatically generate an audience segment for each goal in your conversions campaign summary page. This will be available in the Audience Manager.
If you want to know more about how the use of enhanced conversion-based customer lists could help your business, please get in touch.