Google Ads Enabled Conversion Based Customer Lists By Default

Key Takeaways

What's up, everyone? Welcome to the Surfside PPC YouTube channel. Today, we have a little bit of news and sort of a lesson that goes along with it. So, on June 17th, and Google has announced that conversion-based customer lists will automatically be enabled in accounts that are already using customer match customer match functionality and enhanced conversion tracking. So, if you haven't turned on conversion-based customer lists yet, Google is going to automatically turn them on around the middle of August. I think it's August 18th. They will be automatically turned on your account and start populating. This to me is a sign of Google just using more of our conversion data as audience targeting and just understanding that if you're not feeding Google good conversion data, you're going to be left behind. And that's the number one thing you can do is pay for conversion data in your Google Ads account. If we come over here to my Google Ads account right now, you might say, "What does this even mean?" If you currently go to your admin section here and go to account settings, and you scroll all the way to the bottom, and you have customer match here, you see smart bidding and optimize targeting on and conversion-based lists are on as well. Use all customer match lists in smart bidding and optimize targeting. Turn on conversion-based customer lists. Essentially, what's happening is when you upload customer lists to your account, Google is going to use those customer match lists to essentially help with your overall targeting. The thing to keep in mind is you you do need to implement them into your campaigns, at least I assume you do. So, within a Performance Max campaign, when you're going through your asset groups and you're going into your summary and your signals, you do still need to make sure that your audience signals that you're you include those customer-based lists. So, if we scroll down here, our conversion-based lists, in addition to your customer-based lists. These are all website visitors, and then if we scroll down, I don't know if I'll have enough cuz I don't really We'll see what our website visitor lists are. I don't know if I really have any in this as an example, but you will see some that it's like conversion-based list, and it's it's based on whatever conversion it is. I've actually been setting up more and more in my account, like 60-second sessions, because that is going to be something that Google uses to build a conversion-based list. And if I can drive people to my website and they stay on there for a long period of time and maybe 60 seconds isn't the best example, maybe 2 minutes, 3 minutes, then it's somebody who has interacted with my content, probably potentially more likely than not interested in either my premium section or some type of service. So, essentially when you are adding this targeting into your campaigns, you just need to make sure that you add these audiences into your actual performance max campaigns. Now, search these audiences work to observe, but the way that they observe is that they're still going to if that audience is performing better, it is one of those things that Google can use to say, "Hey, this is a way that we're going to help continuously improve your overall campaign." So, for this one, you would go to your audiences, keywords, and content, audiences down here, and if we scroll to the bottom a little bit, or it's right at the top here actually, our audience segments. You can see I have a bunch in here. Some of these are just in-market, affinity. You should add all those as well, but also include all of these audiences, too. So, edit your audience segments for the campaign level, observation, browse, go to your data segments, and then basically all of these. So, we have customer So, here we go. Perfect example, we found them. So, this is how we add them to our search campaigns, add to cart, begin checkout, book appointment. If I get enough people on these lists, then yeah, there's a good chance that I can actually use it to target. I think my best chance would be engagement. We have a size of zero right now, but I haven't really been running ads over the last month. So, four lists can't be shown due to eligibility issues. That's fine, but just kind of one of the things I want to go over is conversion base list. It is one of those ways to improve your overall account because what Google's going to do is say, "Hey, we're we we're seeing everybody who is completing a phone call and going, you know, calling this company, completing a phone call. We have a list at the end of the month of 100 different phone calls that came in, and we know now audience data, demographic data, search data, basically everything Google, every single signal Google is tracking. So, it's just another signal, another way to improve your audience targeting, and I think Google will always have the keyword targeting, but I think Google wants to get better into audience targeting, and this is one of those another way that they're doing it. So, between enhanced conversion tracking, between customer lists and customer match really being a thing for years. I mean, that's been something I've been doing for like the last 10 years it feels like uploading customer lists, but it's really something that I think with AI they're getting smarter with how to actually target the right audiences. And I think ultimately what Google would like is for a campaign like Performance Max to actually drive better results for people and not kind of be a a black box type campaign. It does seem like there's improvements on that front and a lot of that just kind of comes down to to these types of features. So, I read about this on Search Engine Roundtable. I think Google may have, you know, done it, but here is the actual To help you maximize value and performance of your first-party data, Google is turning on the conversion-based customer list feature for your accounts beginning on June 17th, 2026. Data will begin to be processed on August 18th. So, it's turned on now. Update applies to all customers customers who have already adopted both enhanced conversions and customer customer match, but haven't gone to the account settings to actually turn on the conversion-based lists. No action required. If you wish to opt out, simply turn them off. No real reason to opt out, truthfully. It's only going to help your performance. So, if you are running ads and and you're interested in, you know, customer lists and customer match and conversion-based lists and retargeting, then this is another feature that will definitely help. And, you know, over time I think I think retargeting kind of when it started was great. And then I think a lot of it's just kind of become not as strong as it once was. And now Google is trying to basically become the you know, reinvent it with more of optimized targeting and things like that. I'm not saying retargeting doesn't work. I'm saying when it first was released it kind of went across all of display and all, you know, I used to I used to run retargeting display campaigns that worked great. Today, retargeting is kind of part of your Performance Max, you know, remarketing lists for search ads, retargeting lists for search ads, whatever you want to call them. So, conversion-based customer lists, another news item. If you have any questions, please leave in the comments. And make sure you turn this on now and I would start incorporating it in your campaigns. It will be no downside. So, thank you for watching my videos. Please make sure you subscribe to my YouTube channel.