Overview

Primer allows you to create and enhance audiences that improve your match rate on Google Ads.

Getting Started

Primer gives you the ability to create higher match rate customer re-marketing audiences on the Google Ads platform. These audiences can be used across Search, GDN, YouTube, and Gmail.

Prerequisites

Primer integrates with Google Ads Customer Match, which is not available for all advertisers.

To use Customer Match, your account must have:

• At least 90 days of history in Google Ads

• More than USD $50,000 total lifetime spent

  • Note: For advertisers whose accounts are managed in currencies other than USD, your spend amount will be converted to USD using the average monthly conversion rate for that currency.

• A good history of policy compliance and payment history

Feature availability depends on your account eligibility:

Customer Match features available	Accounts with 90 days of history in Google Ads and more than USD $50,000 lifetime spend	All policy compliant accounts*
"Targeting” setting	Yes	No
"Observation” setting	Yes	Yes
Similar audiences	Yes	Yes (in “Observation” setting)
Manual bid adjustments	Yes	No
Exclusions	Yes	Yes

To start using Customer Match (if you meet the requirements above), contact your assigned account manager to request access.

If you don’t have an account manager, you can reach out to Google Support — they’ll assign one to help you get started.

Recommended Audience Size

It can take up to 72 hours for a Google audience to fully match.

If you’re trying to use Customer Match audiences to only target specific individuals within an audience, we recommend you wait to test Google until you’re prepared to sync audiences through Primer that are >20K in # of records.

However, smaller Customer Match audiences can be effective for:

• Similar Audiences (e.g. Lookalikes): Similar Audiences are the audience that looks like your existing audience from your customer emails, websites, etc. They practically share the same interests with your audience. Use the Primer created Customer Match Audience as the input for a Similar Audience. Similar Audiences in Google Customer Match are identical to Facebook Lookalike audiences.

• Exclusion Audiences: Creating exclusion audiences helps prevent ad dollars from being wasted on bad-fit individuals. Examples of people that you likely don't want to see your retargeting ads, but have a good chance of seeing them anyway, include:

  • your own team

  • direct partners and competitors

  • existing customers (except for upsell of renewal campaigns)

  • job seekers

  • non-ICP prospects (or "bad fit" accounts)

Some other tips include:

• Upload at least 5,000 members to the list to ensure that ads start serving.

• It takes 6 to 48 hours for a list to be populated with members, so you'll most likely see an "In Progress" status (on the Google Ads UI) if you upload to an audience list more frequently than once every 12 hours.

• A list may appear to be smaller than expected when viewed in the Audience Manager in the Google Ads UI. This view shows the number of active users in the list. A user is considered active if they have recently logged into their Google account. For more information on active users, see this discussion on how to troubleshoot low traffic with Customer Match lists.

Locating Primer Audiences in Google Ads

• Click the “Tools and Settings” icon in the top right corner of your screen.

• Under the section labeled “Shared library” click “Audience Manager.”

• Click “Segments” from the Page menu on the left.

• Add a filter for "Type = Customer List"

Use Cases for Google Ads Audiences

Leverage audiences strategically across these high-impact Google Ads campaigns:

• Performance Max (pMax)

• Unbranded Search (Exclusion Targeting)

• Unbranded Search (Inclusion Targeting)

• Google Ads Demand Gen