Google Just Made It Possible to Get Very Close to People

WARNING: If you are someone who normally gets weirded out by privacy issues and conversations, you might want to close this blog right now and not read any further.

If you made it past my warning, you might be as excited as I am about the new service Google is offering advertisers and marketers called "Customer Match." But, before we dive in, how about we start with some statistics …

• As of 2015, there are 900 million Gmail users.
• There are nearly 12 billion monthly Google searches.
• There are 1.17 billion monthly, unique Google searchers.
• Google has 75 percent of the U.S. search market.

If that doesn’t convince you that Google and Gmail present a huge opportunity, then you’re just not thinking right.

This is what Google just made possible: You can now upload your email addresses (1,000 minimum) into AdWords, and then Google will allow you to specifically target the ones that match. This also works with YouTube.

Now give this some thought:

• What if you wanted to target lapsed constituents with a different message than current constituents? Yep, that’s now possible as long as you can segment your lists before uploading them.
• What if you wanted to only target people who have never been a donor to the brand? Yep, you can do that now by thinking of your uploaded list as an exclusion.
• What if you have a natural “upgrade” path for specific types of donors or even a complimentary engagement opportunity for some of your event participants? Yep, you can do that now as long as you can meet the 1,000 minimum upload quantity for each of your lists with specific marketing plans.

While this has been very successful with Facebook, Google’s entrance into this matching-and-targeting strategy is big. Very big.

To quote Google, “Google is in a unique position to connect consumers with your business in the most relevant ways. Whether they’re searching on Google, checking promotions on Gmail or watching videos on YouTube, we can deliver the most relevant information based on what they’re doing, wherever they are, when they’re looking and on any device they’re using.”

I’ll leave you with only two additional comments because I don’t want to delay what I hope is you immediately looking into how this can help your nonprofit:

1. If your privacy-concern flag has gone up a little bit as you read this, please know that Google has documented that once the match is completed, it deletes all of your customer data from its files. In other words, your customer data is still private and not living somewhere else being compiled for later use by Google.
2. I have said this countless times—if you are reading this and your nonprofit has not applied for a Google Grant, you could be giving up $10,000 per month in free AdWords services—some nonprofits are even given $40,000 per month in free advertising. Get on it now!