A big announcement came up today from Google for a new cool feature called Customer Match. This is very similar to Facebook lookalike audiences that advertisers are using for years.

This new product is a new targeting method for Search, Gmail Ads and YouTube, allowing you to upload lists of email addresses and target them accordingly. You can now customise your marketing efforts based on audience segments, re-engage existing customers or focus on reaching new ones who resemble your existing customers through automatically-generated Similar Audience Lists (on Youtube and Gmail)​.​ You can even exclude existing customer from your search campaigns.It's now available to all advertisers through the interface and not in BETA. Perfect timing for the e-commerce pick of Q4. Simple within the Adwords interface under Shared Library you create a new audience by importing your customer's email addresses.

There some limitations though: PLA/Shopping ads will not be compatible at launch but later in the feature and for YouTube only for in-stream TrueView ads. Moreover this is not working with any bid tech for now.In terms of data privacy, the email addresses are uploaded, matched to Google account IDs then the email addresses are deleted so not stored by Google. It is not possible to tell you exactly how many Google IDs Google was able to match (note, this isn't just gmail addresses, as someone can have a Google Account associated with any email address) but give you a range, and you need to hit a certain threshold for ads to serve similarly to remarketing.Brought to you by the Stellar Search Team.