{"id":117135,"date":"2015-11-09T14:58:00","date_gmt":"2015-11-09T19:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dacgroup.com\/why-googles-new-customer-match-is-great-news-for-b2b-marketers\/"},"modified":"2024-12-19T16:40:22","modified_gmt":"2024-12-19T21:40:22","slug":"why-googles-new-customer-match-is-great-news-for-b2b-marketers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dacgroup.com\/en-ca\/insights\/blog\/paid-media\/why-googles-new-customer-match-is-great-news-for-b2b-marketers\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Google\u2019s New Customer Match is Great News for B2B Marketers"},"content":{"rendered":"

For more than a decade, paid search has been a go-to\u00a0channel for digital marketers<\/a>. It’s not hard to understand why. It’s measurable and accountable. It plays right at the bottom of the funnel where the action happens. It’s\u00a0flexible and scalable. Last but not least, when executed with even a moderate degree of expertise, it almost always produces a positive ROI. It’s hard to imagine a comprehensive digital media\u00a0plan that doesn’t include a paid search component, but for one segment of the online marketing<\/a> universe, paid search has always been a bit of a challenge. That segment is B2B. Ask just about any B2B marketer, and they’ll tell you that using paid search for prospecting and acquisition results in some great B2B leads, but those leads come with a whole whack\u00a0of irrelevant B2C leads, making profitability in the channel a big challenge. The problem is that search engines haven’t historically provided a lot of tools to segment these audiences in search. When Google announced its new Customer Match product<\/a> a few weeks ago, a glimmer of hope appeared on the horizon for B2B marketers looking to achieve success in paid search.<\/p>\n

The Problem<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Simply put, searchers don’t generally qualify themselves as either B2B or B2C when they’re searching. For example, let’s say you’re trying to sell gas and electric to small and medium-sized businesses. You would target terms like “small business energy providers” and “electricity rates for businesses.” The good news is that searchers who use those terms would be highly qualified. The bad news is that almost no one uses those terms. In fact, the Google Adwords Keyword Planner estimates that there are just ten<\/em> monthly searches for each of those terms across the entire United States. Now, if you sell this B2B product nationally, those are ten searches you’ll most definitely want to appear for, but you can see the difficulty of building a meaningful search campaign in this way. Those terms without the B2B qualifiers are 60 to 360<\/em> times richer in volume. While B2C is undoubtedly the higher volume segment, it’s also clear that the B2B searchers are primarily using keyword strings that don’t explicitly identify them as a part of that segment. To date, the search engines have really only allowed you to identify potential customers through the keywords they’re searching on, their locations, devices, time factors\u00a0and whether or not they’ve recently visited your site. These things are useful indicators (or proxies for indicators) of intent, but they don’t address the heart of the problem.<\/p>\n

Enter Customer Match<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Google dropped a bit of a bombshell on the search marketing world a few weeks ago when it announced its new Customer Match product for AdWords. This allows marketers to use first-party email lists to match email addresses with signed in Google users when they search. Aside from the Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) product released a couple of years ago<\/a>, this is the first real audience targeting capability for AdWords. This has been a real problem for search marketers (whether B2B or B2C) for quite some time. Essentially, user expectations in search have been shifting fast, and the tools available to search marketers have not kept up. When they search, users expect that Google knows a whole host of things about them to deliver contextually relevant results. Many of those things – location, device and time factors – have been available to search marketers, but the meaningful behavioral data that drives so much of what you see in the non-paid search engine results has been missing. The kind of audience targeting that you can access in other channels like paid social and programmatic display would be extremely useful in search, particularly for B2B marketers. Customer Match promises to deliver on at least some of that potential.<\/p>\n

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