Customer Match IP Matching: Google's New Feature Excludes UK Users

Google has added raw IP address matching to Customer Match, and it does not work for anyone in the UK. If you run Google Ads for a British business, Customer Match IP matching is a feature you can read about and cannot use. That is worth knowing before a well-meaning agent or freelancer tells you to start uploading IP lists.

What Google has actually changed

Customer Match file uploads now accept two new columns: a user IP address and a user interaction timestamp. Both are passed to Google unhashed, unlike email addresses and phone numbers, which are hashed with SHA256. The change was reported on 25 September, and Google's own help page for creating a Customer Match list by file upload now documents the columns.

The appeal is obvious. A list no longer needs an email address or phone number to be useful. If you hold IP data from a first-party source, such as your own server logs or an app, you can match against it directly.

The line that matters for UK advertisers

Google's documentation is explicit: "IP matching isn't supported for end users located in the EEA, UK, or Switzerland (CH)." That covers the 30 European Economic Area states plus the UK and Switzerland, 32 territories in all.

Google does not give a reason on the page, and we will not pretend to know it. What we can say is that IP addresses can count as personal data under UK and EU data protection law, and the exclusion sits neatly over the regions where that law applies. The documentation also leaves the compliance burden with you: advertisers must make sure they have appropriate disclosures and consent, and must filter European users out before upload.

So if your customers are in Manchester, Leeds or Liverpool, this update changes nothing for you. Any pitch that leads with "Google now lets you upload IP addresses" is either uninformed or selling something.

Where it could matter

If you advertise outside the UK. An ecommerce brand selling to customers outside the UK and Europe, with consent properly captured, is the realistic user of this feature. For those markets, the gain is a larger matchable list from data you already hold.

If you run Google Ads accounts for international clients. You will need to filter UK and European records out of any upload. Google's guidance puts that responsibility on you, and a mixed list uploaded carelessly is a compliance problem, not a technical glitch.

For a UK-only business there is no workaround to hunt for. Do not try to get at the same result by uploading IPs through another route.

What to do instead for UK audiences

The tools that work in the UK are the ones that were already working. Hashed email and phone lists remain the strongest first-party signal, as long as you have a lawful basis and proper consent behind them. Google's Customer Match policy page sets out how uploaded data can be used, and it is stricter than most advertisers assume.

Three things are worth doing now:

1. Audit your consent wording. If your enquiry form or checkout does not tell people their details may be used for advertising, fix that before you upload anything.
2. Clean your lists before upload. Duplicates, old contacts and anyone who has unsubscribed should not be in the file.
3. Use customer lists as a signal, not a target. A list of past customers is most useful for excluding them from acquisition spend and for giving Smart Bidding a sense of who converts. Our post on retargeting strategy covers how to build audiences worth paying for.

If you also run campaigns on Meta or TikTok, the same discipline applies there. Our paid social work starts with the data you are allowed to use, not the data you wish you had.

Why this is a trap for agencies

New features create a predictable sales pattern. Someone reads a headline, builds a pitch around it and quotes for setup work, without checking the help page. The exclusion above sits in the same documentation that announces the feature, so checking takes two minutes.

There is a practical point too. If you work with international clients, test any new upload format with a small file first and confirm the list is accepted before sending the full dataset. A rejected upload costs you a morning. A badly formatted one that gets accepted costs you a month of matching against the wrong people.

A quick test before you act on any platform update

Ask three questions. Does it apply in the UK? Does it apply to the account type and campaign type you run? And does it change a decision you were going to make anyway? If the answer to the first is no, stop there. Most platform news fails one of the three, and the skill is in noticing quickly.

The honest view

This is a genuine product change with a narrow audience. For most UK small businesses, the right response is to read it, note that it excludes you, and carry on. The bigger gains still come from cleaner conversion tracking, tighter landing pages and better-built search campaigns, which is what our Google Ads service is built around.

If you want a second opinion on how your first-party data is being used in your accounts, get in touch and we will go through it with you.