Remarketing campaigns show advertisements to people who visited your online store but are now on other websites. Bloomreach Engagement allows you to create marketing automation scenarios that reach out to these customers and present personalized messages to them.

This guide will help you to create a remarketing scenario that creates a remarketing audience from your website's customer list and uploads their details to Google Ads.

Watch this introductory video on this integration:

There are two possible ways of integrating Bloomreach Engagement with Google Ads audiences:

1. Connect your Google Ads account with Bloomreach Engagement and use Google's Customer Match feature to create custom audiences based on customer's email address/phone number, audiences based on customer's mobile device ID if you want to retarget users of your mobile application, or an audience based on any User ID (Google Ads ID) that you can provide using Google Ads tag.

2. Connect your Google Analytics account with Bloomreach Engagement and create a Google Analytics audience based on the Google Analytics cookie. Then import this Google Analytics audience to Google Ads. Note that this is an experimental feature that is not intended for use in production scenarios.

📘

This article will explain how to create an Ad Audience through Google Ads Customer Match. To learn how to achieve this through Google Analytics instead, click here. Beware that currently, this is an experimental feature with some limitations to consider. Please, read the warning at the start of the article carefully.

📘

Tips & Tricks

Refer to our documentation to learn more about:

• Why you should run ads with Bloomreach Engagement
• How you can combine Ad Audiences with AI Predictions
• Relevant Use Cases for your business
• Best Practices for Ad Audience Management

Retargeting through Google Ads Customer Match

🚧

Requirements for using Customer Match

Customer Match is not available for all Google Ads advertisers. To use Customer Match for Google Ads, your Google Ads account must have:

• A good history of policy compliance with Google Ads
• A good payment history in Google Ads
• At least 90 days history in Google Ads.
• More than USD 50,000 total lifetime spend on Google Ads

If Customer Match is available for your Google Ads account, you also need to have edit rights for your Google Ads account to implement this integration.

Read more about the requirements in the Google Ads docs article here:
https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/6299717?hl=en

🚧

Consents for Customer Match version 15 and above

With the Google Ads API v15 via the Ad Audiences node, you can use the latest compliant API, but you have to make sure you have both required consents ‘ad_user_data’ and ‘ad_personalization’ consent.

Please note that you're responsible to track the right consents as well as to ensure that those are used with the Ad Audience node. Find more details here.

Step 1: Integrate your Google Ads account with your Bloomreach Engagement project

First, go to integrations and connect your Bloomreach Engagement project to your Google Ads account.

📘

Single Tenant Instances

In case you encounter an error "This app is blocked" or similar, please contact our Support. Note that Google requires your Bloomreach Engagement instance to get verified by Google prior to integrating since Bloomreach Engagement processes sensitive customer data. Our Support will engage in the verification process once contacted.

Step 2: Create a scenario to define your audience

Now you need to create a scenario which will define the desired group of customers for retargeting and add them to your Google Ads audience. Create a flow as indicated below:

Double-click the Ad audiences node to open a modal window, select "Google Ads", and then "Customer match". Click on "Customer matching" to enable matching customers by Email, Phone, Mobile advertiser ID, and Google Ads ID.

🚧

Deprecation of Mobile Advertiser ID and Google Ads ID

Mobile Advertiser ID and Google Ads ID were discontinued by the network.

Step 3: Check if the audience was created in your Google Ads account

Go to your Google Ads account. In the Tools menu, go to Shared Library > Audience manager and check if your audience has been successfully uploaded.

User ID Matching

In case you would need to work with User ID audiences, a specific set of steps is required.

1. You need to track the User ID to Google beforehand. Set up special tracking for Google matching pixels that you can find in the tag manager pre-set or track it within your existing tagging infrastructure.

2. Only User ID-based Google Ads audiences are eligible for uploading User ID data. Ensure you either create a new User ID-based audience or pick an existing User-ID based audience in the Ad Audiences node configuration

3. In the Customer matching section of the Ads Audiences node, configure which customer ID or attribute will be sent to Google Ads

📘

Once you upload the audience to Google Ads, the following process takes place:

• Google Ads will check the format of the uploaded data.
• Google Ads will match your data to your customers on Google's networks.
• You can add this list to your targeting now, but matching can take up to 24 hours to finish.
• When the matching is complete, your ads can start showing to your new audiences. Lists must have at least 1000 matched users for them to serve.

<!-- use this tag to send Bloomreach Engagement external ID to Google Ads and then use this User ID in the retargeting scenarios -->
<script>
  gtag('event', 'page_view', {
    'send_to': '[[GoogleAdsConversionID]]', // 
    'user_id': '{{ customer_ids.cookie if customer_ids.cookie is string else customer_ids.cookie | last }}'  // Bloomreach Engagement cookie, feel free to customize
  });
</script>

📘

Membership duration

Please note that Google Ads integration sends a membership_life_span of 180 days when creating an audience.

However, this applies only to the audiences created directly from Bloomreach via the integration. If the audiences already existed, for example, by being manually created in Google (and updated via Bloomreach), they might have other durations. This is because they are specified during the creation process of the audiences.

Removing customers

In case the customer asks for the removal of all his data, it is now possible to pick if you want to add or remove a customer to or from a Google Ads audience.

🚧

Troubleshooting

Double-check your Conversion ID values in the source code of both tags with the conversion tracking code that you can usually find in the Google Ads interface, under Tools & Settings > Conversions > Tag setup.

📘

Retargeting nodes track events automatically. This enables simple evaluations of retargeting scenarios that contribute to the single customer view of a customer.

Consent policy

Consent policy settings are part of the retargeting node, which simplifies the design of the retargeting scenarios and ensures that only people with proper consent will be pushed to Google Ads audiences.

Please note that with Bloomreach Engagement version 1.254, we have enabled using the Google Ads API v15 via the Ad Audiences node. This means that since this version, the consent Category is interpreted as having both the ‘ad_user_data’ and ‘ad_personalization’ consent. Find more details can be found here.

Now click on the Audience drop-down, and click + CREATE NEW. Give your audience a name and save it, then click save again to return to the scenario editor. Save the whole scenario now. You can click on TEST to see how many customers will flow to the retargeting node.

You can now start the scenario, which will add the defined customers to your Google Ads Audience.

Audience with the same name as you defined it should now appear in Audiences in your Google Ads account.

Doubleclick Integration in Google Marketing Platform

Google allows you to share Google Ads audiences with Display & Video 360 (former Doubleclick Bid Manager) and Search Ads 360 (former Doubleclick Search).