Google Ads Customer Match Lists Soon Can Be Used With Smart Bidding & Optimized Targeting

Google sent some advertisers emails saying “beginning Q2 2022, campaigns using Smart Bidding and/or Optimized Targeting will be able to use all Customer Match lists in your account to enhance your ad campaign performance for your goals (e.g. conversions). Today, you only experience these performance benefits when your lists are actively applied to campaigns.”

As Greg Finn reported “this is a shift from how Customer Match lists are applied today. Advertisers currently need to manually apply these to a campaign.” “Customer Match lists won’t be used with manual bidding strategies. However, advertisers may still use bid modifiers manually to adjust bids,” Finn added.

Google published this timeline for the change:

• Video ad campaign in Q2 2022
• Discovery ad campaign in Q3 2022
• Performance Max ad campaign in Q3 2022
• Search ad campaign in Q4 2022
• Shopping ad campaign in Q4 2022

If you don’t want your Customer Match lists to be included to improve your Smart Bidding or optimized targeting performance, opt-out of automatically using available customer lists in your account:

1. Select the customer ID for the individual account.
2. From the page menu on the left, click Settings, then Account Settings.
3. In the “Customer Match” section, uncheck the “Use all Customer Match lists in Smart Bidding or Optimized Targeting” checkbox.

Finally, customer match lists are automatically included in Smart Bidding. Major update for @GoogleAds and crm data. pic.twitter.com/l2BaFbZbT7

— BenjaminWenner (@BN_Wenner) May 4, 2022

Yay for more automation?

Forum discussion at Twitter.