Can You Use the Remarketing Feature for Google Ad Grants?

Google AdWords announced an email remarketing feature for search ads a while ago, but did not mention the policy for AdGrants users. (Read more about Adwords remarketing lists for search ads).  We reached out to AdWords customer support to clarify whether or not this feature was available for AdGrants, but they said it was a “gray area” and they were not sure. So, we decided to test it out.

During the setup process, there is a ‘sanitizing’ process that must be completed prior to uploading the list of emails. You will want to make sure that:

1: All columns (including headers) are eliminated, except the email addresses.

2: The email addresses are hashed with SHA256 algorithm and saved in .csv format. In this case, hashing is a one-way encryption process that allows Google to match email addresses with information in their database.

Once your list is ready, upload it to the shared library – audience – +remarketing list – customer emails.

During this process, you can view the number of emails being matched in the ‘list size’ column.

Next, choose your favorite campaign/ad group and choose this remarketing list as an audience.

Unfortunately, once you reach this step, you will receive a notification that your account is not eligible to target by that criteria type. Google has not enabled this feature for AdGrants.

We hope this will become available for AdGrants in the future, as it will greatly help nonprofits engage their audience in a much more sophisticated way. If there are any changes to this policy, we will post an update.