Customer Match policy - Advertising Policies Help (original) (raw)
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This policy applies to advertisers using Customer Match for campaigns on Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, or Gmail.
Requirements for accessing Customer Match
To access Customer Match, your account or manager account must have:
- A good history of policy compliance
- A good payment history
If your account does not have a good history of policy compliance and does not meet the above criteria, then your account is currently ineligible to use Customer Match.
Additionally for personalized ads on Google Search, Shopping, Gmail, and YouTube, first-party and third-party data use policies apply.
Available Customer Match features
Features available to advertisers depend on which requirements your account satisfies:
- All policy-compliant advertisers can use Customer Match and similar audiences for Customer Match in the “Observation” setting and for Exclusions.
- If you have 90 days of Google Ads history and more than USD $50,000 total lifetime spend, you can use Customer Match and similar audiences for Customer Match in the "Targeting" and "Observation" settings, manual bid adjustments, and Exclusions. 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.
| Feature | 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 |
| Manual bid adjustments | Yes | No |
| Exclusions | Yes | Yes |
*Your accounts must have a good history of policy compliance and good payment history.
Google may remove access to Customer Match
To protect users, advertisers may lose access to Customer Match if their ads have the potential to cause harm to users or create a poor user experience. We may take the following considerations, among others, into account when making this determination:
- User feedback
- Prevalence or severity of abuse
- Repeated violations of the Customer Match policy
We may remove access to Customer Match for any advertiser, including those with only partial access.
Collecting customer data
When using Customer Match, you may only upload customer information that you collected in the first-party context, such as information you collected from your websites, apps, physical stores, or other situations where customers shared their information directly with you.
Examples (non-exhaustive):
- You collected information from a customer who had purchased an item from your website.
- You collected information from a customer who registered to receive marketing messages through your apps.
- You collected information from a customer who signed up for your loyalty program in your physical store.
You’re also required to:
- Ensure that your privacy policy discloses that you share customer data with third parties to perform services on your behalf
- Obtain consent for such sharing where required by law or any applicable Google policies governing personalized ads and/or user consent including Google’s EU User Consent Policy
- Only use Google’s approved API or interface to upload customer data
- Comply with all applicable laws and regulations, including any self-regulatory or industry codes that may apply
Updating Customer Match lists
Customer Match lists have a maximum membership duration of 540 days. Any list memberships added or refreshed more than 540 days ago will no longer be eligible. To stay eligible, a list must have at least 100 members added or updated within the last 540 days. We recommend regularly refreshing your Customer Match lists. You can refresh your Customer Match lists through several methods, including continuous syncing with third-party CRMs or manual uploads.
Additional requirements
The following is not allowed:
- Running ads that collect personally identifiable information, except for Gmail ads with HTML forms that comply with the Demand Gen ads format requirements
- Uploading information for any customer who is under the age of 13 or that was collected from any site or app directed to children under the age of 13
- Creating ad content which implies knowledge of personally identifiable information or sensitive information about your customers (see below for more information)
- Using a customer list that targets an overly narrow or specific audience. For example, you can’t combine a customer list with other targeting criteria like geographic limitations if it results in an ad targeted to a relatively small number of users
- Advertising for products related to sensitive information, such as pharmaceutical products, in a Customer Match campaign or
- Running any ads that are prohibited by our Google Ads policies
Restrictions on sensitive categories
As defined under the Personalized advertising policy principles applicable to remarketing, advertisers can’t use sensitive interest categories to target ads to users or to promote advertisers’ products or services.These policies also apply to remarketing with Customer Match.
Additionally, you can't use data from your Customer Match campaigns to identify sensitive interest categories related to your customers.
For comprehensive information about what’s considered a sensitive interest category under Personalized ads and Customer match policies, review the Personalized advertising policies.
What happens if you violate our policies
- Compliance review: We may review your business for compliance with the Customer Match policy at any time. If we contact you to request information related to compliance, you're required to respond in a timely manner and swiftly take any corrective action needed to comply with our policies. If you’re a manager account, we may also contact your managed accounts to verify compliance.
- Notification of non-compliance: If we believe that you're violating Customer Match policy, we'll contact you to request corrective action. If you fail to make the requested corrections you may be denied the ability to use Customer Match, or your access to your Google Ads accounts may be suspended. You can contact us if you want to appeal your Customer Match policy violation. In cases of serious or repeated violations, your account may be suspended immediately and without notification. Learn more about Google Ads Policy account suspensions.
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