Hi,
This is Jing, a data analyst with great passion for data science and big data technology. This blog is gonna to show you a simple business case of marketing automation on Google Cloud Platform. It is about how to do more accurate customer retargeting on Google Ads and Facebook Ads by using Customer Match.
Prerequisite
Before we start, I assume you have some knowledge about python and Google Cloud Platform. Besides, I also suggest you to read a little bit about Customer Match if this is your first time hear about it.
Customer Match for Digital Marketing
“Customer Match lets you use your online and offline data to reach and re-engage with your customers across Search, Shopping, Gmail, and YouTube. Using information that your customers have shared with you, Customer Match will target ads to those customers and other customers like them.” from Google Ads Help
A Use Case of Automating Digital Marketing
A digital marketing team wants to do more accurate retargeting at Google Ads and Facebook, which means they only want to show the Ads to the potential customers or the customers have left us, and meanwhile do not want to show the Ads to the existing customers including the newly converted ones. This task can be done by using the customer matching function in Google Ads and Facebook by creating audience lists and adding rules on the audience lists.
It can be quite common that some of the customers are joining us and some of them are leaving us every day. For most of the cases, the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database is updated accordingly automatically, but not the audience list in the Google Ads and Facebook.
If there are 20 types of products or services you company provide, and the retargeting Ads is at the product level, that means you have to update 20 audience lists in the Google Ads and another 20 in the Facebook. If you want to make the retargeting accurate, updating these audience list daily is necessary. Manually updating seems a lot of tedious repetitive work. So automating this process is inevitable. With the help of Google Cloud Platform, the automation process can be done within a real short time period around 5-10 working days with limited resources and low cost.
How do we do the Retargeting in Google Ads?
In our case, we created audience lists that we do not want Google to display the Ads to. The customers in the audience lists are our current customers in CRM database.
- Customer private personal information in CRM database will be used (e.g. phone number, e-mails). Make sure information is saved compliant to the GDPR.
- Send hashed customer information to Google Ads, which will be our audience lists in Google Ads. Different audience lists are for different products.
- Google Ads find these customers by doing customer matching based on the hashed customer information.
- Add rules like “exclude” to our audience lists, which means we do not want to display adds to these customers.
How do we automate the Retargeting process?
I don’t really remember. It was a use case I did in 2017. Tools and technologies has changes a lot during the time. I believe there are more modern ways than I did at that time. I just want to share this use case to inspire. Hope you liked it! If you don’t, I am sorry, but there is no dislike button here either.
End
This is a pretty old post which I forgot to finish. Not sure how much things have changes within digital marketing world. After that, I have been focusing on product analytics area. So unfortunately could not follow up on the changes. But still want to share, and hope it can be inspiring. Thanks for reading. I am Jing, a data scientist aiming to be better and better.
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