Google Match Rates

Keep in mind that your match rate is not an indicator of how your lists will perform, but rather an indicator of whether you're uploading the right data in the right way.

About Google Customer Match

Your Customer Match match rate is the percentage of your uploaded customer list that could be connected to Google users, so you can see how much of your list is usable.

How match rates are shown

You can create a customer data file based on the information shared by your customers (for example, customers who have signed up for your business’s newsletter, customers who have bought from you before that have churned, etc.). Your list will be uploaded by a secure hashing algorithm, turning the emails into codes that cannot be unencrypted. Google does not receive the actual email addresses, nor can Google see the contents of the list. Google accounts are also in hashed codes, and the codes are compared to determine if there’s a match.

After this process is done, your data file is deleted. Whether or not there’s a match, Google doesn’t keep this data or use it for any other purposes.

How it works

Once you’ve created a customer list, you’ll be able to see your match rate on the file upload success page.

You can now see your match rate instantly in your Google Ads account and the match rates of your previous uploads. You can see instant match rate percentages for the number of rows uploaded in each uploaded batch of files and the ability to review all your uploads since April 1, 2020, and understand the upload statistics for those operations. We don’t show exact match rates. Your match rates will be grouped in a bucket and shown as a batch rate percentage.

Common Issues

Two common issues with Customer Match are upload problems and small reported Customer Match list sizes. Both can be traced to problematic data file formatting or incorrect hashing.

Low match rate

“No or low volume” is often caused by too small of a list, too narrow of targeting, and/or low bids or budgets compared to other remarketing campaigns.

For Customer Match ads to serve, they must have a minimum threshold of active users at the time the ad is served (active users are the number of users on your list that are active on Gmail, Search, YouTube, or Display). At any given time, the number of active users will likely be less than your total audience list size - not everyone is signed in all the time.

Google recommends audience list sizes of at least 1,000 users to prevent ads from not serving. We've found the most success with list sizes of around 20,000 users.

Any additional targeting restrictions you add on top of the Customer Match list will further narrow down the audience list of potential users your campaign can target, ultimately leading to low or no volume.

Lists have a constant “In progress” status

Customer Match uploads can take up to 48 hours to process. If you upload or make changes to your audience lists each day you may see a constant “In progress” status as a result.

For example, let’s say your audience lists take 6 hours to process. You upload new audience list updates every 4 hours, every day. Each time you upload a new audience list, it will trigger an “In progress” status so your audience list will always show as “In progress” even though previous updates were complete.

More information on the customer matching process can be found here:

About the customer matching process - Google Ads Helpsupport.google.com