Follow The Leader; Google Follows Facebook's Ad Lead

Google announced two new types of ads that mirror Facebook’s successful targeting ads.

At this year’s Advertising Week, Google revealed a new way for brands to target their own customers with ads, giving them a marketing opportunity similar to what is already offered by top competitor Facebook.

The new program allows advertisers to import their customer lists to Google and market directly to them through Gmail, YouTube and search. Basically, this means advertisers will now be able to take their customer files and match them against Google’s Gmail master file. Then from that list of matches, they will be able to create an audience list from which to target ads across Google’s domain.

Additionally, brands will be able to target Internet duplicates, which are users who share the same characteristics as those on their customer lists, extending their marketing reach.

Twitter and Facebook both have comparable audience-building ad programs that let brands retarget users, in order to send messages to their customers on those platforms. Facebook defines its program as “people-based marketing,” because it allows advertisers to distribute ads to known customers rather than just trying to guess at who is on the other end of the computer.

Indeed, Facebook has nearly 1.5 billion registered users and even though Google still commands the overall online advertising market, Facebook has become a significant opponent. With its highly focused marketing foundation, the social networking company tops Google in display ad revenue in the United States according to an eMarketer statistic, “$6.8 billion to Google’s $3.5 billion in 2015”.

Nevertheless, Google has yet to fully take advantage of the many aspects of its business, as demonstrated by this new tool to match audiences for advertisers. Gmail has approximately 900 million registered users and Google owns high traffic and most commonly used properties such as the Chrome Web browser, You Tube, Android phones and Google Play.

Unfortunately, due to regulations and heavy industry scrutinization, Google has been slow to implement more targeted ad systems. However, Facebook’s advancement into this area has helped pave the way for Google, providing the opportunity to retarget people in search, Gmail and You Tube.

Agencies and brands alike have been waiting for Google to offer this type of targeting. Google currently allows some retargeting into search with its, “Remarketing Lists for Search Ads”, but that method makes it difficult for brands to discern whether or not their ad showed up appropriately in an individual search result.

All of the big name brands have grown more serious about managing data on consumers, assembling email lists and establishing segments of their audiences, dividing them up by age, income, gender and household characteristics for marketing purposes.

Now, thanks to this new marketing development, you only have to import your customer list, match targets across Google and watch it drive revenue.

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