Google’s Updated Customer Match Retention Policy When Using Marketing Cloud Advertising

What is Google Customer Match?

Google Customer Match is a feature in Google Ads and DV360 that allows businesses to find and target audiences based on PII like email addresses, phone numbers, or mailing addresses. This is how Marketing Cloud Advertising Studio deliver those types of identifiers to Google Ads.

By activating this information to Google Ads and DV360, businesses can reach their existing customers across Google’s owned platforms like Search, YouTube, Gmail, and Google owned Display channels. 

What does this mean? 

Every record Salesforce Marketing Cloud Advertising (Ad Studio) sends and matches to Google via this Customer Match pathway will have a “countdown” set of 540 days.

As a result, customers who have long-running audiences (more than 540 days) may see declining match counts and match rates, as users who have been in audiences for more than 540 days are removed. There is never a situation where this could inappropriately add a user to targeting, and in many cases this could serve as a healthy reduction of audience members unlikely to respond to advertising. 

What can I do?

Creating a new audience will reset the membership to 540 days from the time the audience is created. Regular audience refresh activity in MC Advertising (Advertising Studio Studio) will not extend this membership period.