This recent article on the Google Analytics blog reminded me of a great strategy that allows you to market your message to a very precise group. Yep, people who have opened their wallets before and – all going well – are most likely to do it again, if you can locate them as they browse the Internet.

Google’s Customer Match product allows you to do exactly this. Just four steps to follow and you should be up and running in moments.

First up, locate a list of their email addresses. Hopefully, that’s close to hand as you have been using it frequently but respectfully with your pre-Christmas email marketing messages.

Now take this list – having encoded it in a Google-approved format – and upload it into your AdWords account. Sit back and let Google see if it can match these addresses with those of existing Google account holders.

All going well you will get a response that confirms that a good number have been matched – and that this number is over the Google threshold. This is the target audience for your advertising.

Finally, you are left with the task of creating some swanky images and / or advertising text to put in front of this audience while they are either, a) using Google Search, b) watching videos on YouTube, or c) reading email messages within their Gmail account. (The only proviso being that they need to be logged into their Google account to make the match work and the advertising be seen.)

So how could you use this over the next few weeks?

Let’s say you are running a Boxing Day Sale with deals so good that spending large on marketing will burn through your margin. Let’s also say you want to reward your customers by letting them know the good news before you tell everyone else.

Yes, you will send out an email letting customers know, hoping they will clear them before Christmas Day. However, you could supplement this with Customer Match to find those customers on Search – YouTube and Gmail as well.

Customer Match is just one of a dozen or so ways you can target your advertising across the Google environment. This short overview of Display Advertising Options provides more detail for anyone interested in finding more nooks and crannies on the Internet to find high quality leads.