There are a million things PPC marketers are always trying to keep straight since so many aspects of our job vary by channel. There are some things I’m constantly “relooking” up the specs for. Recently, list uploads have been one of them.
I’ve been working with my clients more and more recently on using their lists in our paid digital marketing efforts. I’ll go over some ways that we’ve been expanding on how we use client lists to give you some thoughts on how/why you might do this as well.
Why Use Customer Lists?
There are multiple reasons why you should use customer lists and they can vary for your search or social. One of the biggest reasons to use lists is to improve targeting to create a better experience for your target audience(s). You can segment your messaging to ensure you’re showing the right ad to the right audience at the right time. You can also gain key learnings about your audience’s behavior/intent to see actions such as when they visit your site, vs when they convert (time of day, seasonally, etc). You can improve performance to make sure the right audience also does not see certain ads as well.
How to Use Customer Lists:
The possibilities here are endless and depend on the variety of your customer lists available to you but here are a few examples:
- Specifically, target or exclude specific customer lists. Examples include existing customers, opt-outs, churned customers or disqualified leads
- Target or exclude lookalikes/similar audiences from your customer lists.
- For search, add positive or negative bid modifiers for the lists based on performance when they have been added as observation.
- Use remarketing to your existing customers as an upsell or cross-sell offer.
- Use remarketing to bring contacts down your funnel. These might include non-converted opt-in list members, past webinar/event attendees, etc
- Target ABM or ICP lists from other sources that match the characteristics of your prospects or customers.
- Compare order value or MQLs generated or other factors such as loyalty program enrollers/subscribers, newsletter sign-up, or other actions important to your business.
List Headers by Channel
- Email address matching: Email
- Phone matching: Phone
- Mailing address matching: First Name, Last Name, Country, Zip
- Fields properly formatted: Email First Name Last Name Country Zip Email Zip Phone
- Contact Targeting:
- One of the following is required: Email address, First and last name, Company name, Mobile device ID (Apple IDFA or Google AID)
- Fields properly formatted:email firstname lastname jobtitle employeecompany country appleidfa googleaid
- Company Targeting:
- One of the following is required: Company name, Company website, Company email domain, LinkedIn Company Page URL, Stock symbol
- Bonus fields include: Industry, City, State, Company Country, Zip Code
- Fields properly formatted: companyname companywebsite companyemaildomain linkedincompanypageurl stocksymbol industry city state companycountry zipcode
- Accepted Fields: Email, Phone, Mobile Advertiser ID, Facebook App User ID, Facebook Page User ID, First Name, Last Name, City, State/Province, Country, Date of Birth, Year of Birth, Age, Zip/Postal Code, Gender
- Fields properly formatted: email phone madid uid pageuid fn ln ct st country dob doby age zip gen
- Accepted Fields:
- Email addresses
- Mobile Advertising IDs (iOS Advertising Identifiers and Google Advertising IDs, or when not available, Android IDs)
- TTwitter @handles or Twitter user IDs
- Accepted Fields:
- Apple IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers) or GAID (Google Advertising ID)
- Fields properly formatted: Mobile ID (heading name not required)
- A single column of emails OR mobile advertising IDs OR phone numbers.
- Accepted Fields: email (as is)
Things to Remember
- List size match rates vary by channel and your list has to be large enough to match to be able to use.
- Personal vs work email addresses make a huge difference by platform and will impact your match rates.
- Your lists need to be refreshed often – just don’t upload them and forget them!
- LinkedIn is the only channel where companies can be targeted
- Your results can be impacted by the quality of the list, so if you don’t believe your list isn’t accurate, you might not want to use it.
- Privacy matters! Make sure you are using lists that include opt-ins only.
