Tugus Docs

Audiences (Customer Match)

Build Google Ads Customer Match audiences from your own customer and attribution data — hashed and consent-filtered.

Audiences turn the customer data you already collect into Google Ads Customer Match lists: segments of hashed email addresses you can target (or exclude) in your campaigns. Because Tugus knows each customer's revenue, first-touch channel and purchase history, an audience is just a query over that data — no CSV exports, no manual list building.

Everything below is configured in the dashboard under Audiences.

How it works

  1. You describe who belongs in the audience (a template or your own criteria).
  2. Tugus builds the member set from your data — only consented customers, with their email addresses SHA‑256 hashed (plain text never leaves the system).
  3. The list is pushed to your connected Google Ads account as a Customer Match audience (see Pushing to Google).

Templates

The quickest start is a template. Each is a ready-made definition you can use as-is or adjust:

All customers (90 / 365 days)

Everyone who bought recently — the 365-day list is the seed for lookalikes.

High-value top 5%

Your highest-spending customers by revenue.

New vs. returning customers

First-time buyers, or customers with an earlier first purchase.

Affiliate customers

Customers first attributed through an affiliate network — unique to Tugus's own attribution.

Google Ads customers

Customers originally won through Google Ads.

Exclusion: returning customers

Exclude existing customers from new-customer campaigns.

Building your own

The audience builder lets you combine criteria — all optional, combined with AND:

  • Customers only — profiles with at least one purchase.
  • Active within N days — seen in the last N days.
  • Customer type — all, new (first purchase within N days) or returning (first purchase older than N days).
  • Affiliate-attributed only — first touch via an affiliate network.
  • Sources / mediums — first-touch utm_source / utm_medium (e.g. google, cpc).
  • Minimum revenue or Top % by revenue.

As you adjust the criteria, the builder shows a live estimated size.

Google only activates targeting once a list has roughly 1,000 matched members. Smaller lists stay a draft — the estimated size tells you where you stand.

Status & preparing

Each audience shows a status:

StatusMeaning
DraftNew, or below the minimum size.
Ready to pushMembers computed, meets the minimum.
Syncing / SyncedBeing sent to / accepted by Google.
OutdatedThe definition changed since the last sync.

Prepare recomputes the members and checks the size without sending anything to Google — a safe preview. The run history records each prepare and sync.

Lookalike

Google retired "Similar Audiences", so a lookalike is really a strong seed plus Google's in-campaign expansion. The Lookalike wizard helps you:

  1. Pick a large, high-quality seed (e.g. All customers 365 days or High-value top 5%).
  2. Create it as a Customer Match list.
  3. In your Google Ads campaign, add the list and enable Optimized Targeting — Google then expands to similar users.

Pushing to Google

Pushing a list to Google Ads requires a connected Google Ads account and a one-time setup by your administrator (OAuth with the Data Manager scope + a Google Cloud project). Until that is enabled, audiences work fully in preview mode — you can build, size and prepare them, but nothing is sent externally.

Privacy: only customers with marketing consent are included, and email addresses are always SHA‑256 hashed before upload. Match rates on Google are typically 60–75% and are reported honestly.