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User-provided data matching

Page Summary

User-Provided Data Matching (UPDM) allows you to join your first-party data with a user's signed-in activity across Google ad data.
UPDM is only available for ad events linked to signed-in users on Google owned & operated data and is not impacted by third-party cookie deprecation.
To use UPDM, you must upload first-party data collected about your users and ensure your privacy policy and consent acknowledgements comply with applicable laws and policies.
Data uploaded for UPDM must meet specific formatting requirements, including hashing for certain fields like email, phone, and name.
Match tables are created to join your first-party data with Google ad data, which can then be queried to gain insights and calculate metrics like match rate.

User-provided data matching (UPDM) joins first-party data that you've collected about a user—such as information from your websites, apps, or physical stores—with that same user's signed-in activity across all Google ad data, including Google owned & operated data. This includes data bought through Google Marketing Platform (GMP) products, for example, YouTube bought using Display & Video 360. Other GMP products which are not Google owned & operated are not supported.

To be eligible for user-provided data matching, the ad event must be linked to a signed-in user in Google ad data.

This document describes the user-provided data matching feature, and provides guidance on setup and use.

Private Cloud Match Overview

Gaining valuable advertising insights often requires stitching together data from multiple sources. Building your own solution to this data pipeline problem requires significant time investment and engineering investment. Private Cloud Match in Ads Data Hub streamlines this process by providing an Ads Data Hub query template for creating a match table in BigQuery that can then be used in your Ads Data Hub queries to match your ads data with your first-party data. Enriching your queries with first-party data can deliver richer customer experiences, and is more resistant to industry-wide ad-tracking changes.

Because user-provided data matching is only available on Google owned and operated inventory for signed-in users, it is not impacted by the upcoming deprecation of third-party cookies. Since it's more resistant to industry changes than third-party data, it can provide richer insights, which can lead to higher customer engagement.

Process summary

Setup of data ingestion and matching
- You Make sure your first-party data is located in BigQuery and your service account has read access to it. See Set up data ingestion.
First-party data ingestion and matching
- You format and upload your first-party data to your BigQuery dataset.
- You initiate a data-matching request by creating a Private Cloud Match analysis query and setting a schedule.
- Google joins data between your project and Google-owned data containing Google's user ID and hashed user-provided data to build and update match tables.
- See Ingest first-party data
Ongoing queries in Ads Data Hub, based on matched data
- You run queries against the match tables in the same way you run regular queries in Ads Data Hub. See Query matched data.

Learn about privacy requirements

Collecting customer data

When using user-provided data matching, you must upload first-party data. This could be information you collected from your websites, apps, physical stores, or any information that a customer shared with you directly.

You must:

Ensure that your privacy policy discloses that you share customer data with third parties to perform services on your behalf, and that you obtain consent for such sharing where legally required
Only use Google's approved API or interface to upload customer data
Comply with all applicable laws and regulations, including any self-regulatory or industry codes that may apply

First-party consent acknowledgement

To ensure you are able to use your first-party data in Ads Data Hub, you must confirm that you have obtained proper consent to share data from EEA end users with Google per the EU user consent policy and Ads Data Hub policy. This requirement applies to each Ads Data Hub account, and must be updated every time you upload new first-party data. Any one user can make this acknowledgement on behalf of the entire account.

Note that the same Google service query rules that apply to analysis queries also apply to UPDM queries. For example, you can't run cross-service queries on users in the EEA when you create a match table.

To learn how to acknowledge consent in Ads Data Hub, see Consent requirements for the European Economic Area.

Data size

To protect end-user privacy, user-provided data matching enforces these requirements regarding the size of your data:

You must upload least 1,000 records in your user list.

Set up data ingestion

Before you start, make sure:

Your first-party data must be in BigQuery. If you have a VPC-SC perimeter, this first party data must be located within your VPC-SC.
Your Ads Data Hub service account must have read access to the first-party data.
Your first-party data must be formatted and hashed correctly. See next section for more details.

Beyond that, Private Cloud Match has no additional onboarding. If you can run an analysis query, you can run a Private Cloud Match query.

Ingest and match first-party data

Format data for input

Your data must adhere to these formatting requirements to be correctly matched:

Where indicated in the following input field descriptions, you must upload using SHA256 hashing.