Google Ads added two new identifiers to Customer Match, and both of them come with a catch. You can now upload user IP addresses and interaction timestamps, but they have to go up unhashed, and the feature is not available in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland. If you run Google Ads with any European traffic, read the restriction before you touch the upload template.
What Was Added
Search Engine Land reported on September 25, 2026 that Google expanded the Customer Match file format to eight columns. Two of those columns are new.
- User IP address. The IP address associated with the customer interaction.
- User interaction timestamp. When that customer actually engaged with you.
The identifiers you already had are unchanged. Email address, phone number, mailing address, and mobile device ID all still work the same way they did before.
The point of adding them is better matching. More signals mean Google can connect more of your uploaded records to real Google accounts, which raises your match rate and makes the resulting audience list bigger and more usable. No match rate figures were published, so there is no number to hold Google to yet.
The Unhashed Part Is The Real Story
Every other identifier in Customer Match gets hashed before it leaves your machine. You run the email address through SHA-256, you upload the hash, and Google never sees the raw value. That is the reason most legal teams were comfortable with it.
These two new fields do not work that way. IP addresses and interaction timestamps have to be uploaded unhashed.
That is a meaningful change in what you are handing over. An IP address is not a hashed token that only matches if Google already has the same record. It is raw data about where a person connected from.
I would not treat this as a routine feature addition. Adding two columns to a spreadsheet is easy. Deciding whether your business should send unhashed IP addresses to an ad platform is a different question, and not one to answer because a new column showed up.
Where You Cannot Use It
The feature is unavailable in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland. That is not a soft recommendation. Google is putting the responsibility on you.
Before you upload anything
- Exclude EEA, UK, and Switzerland users from any file that contains IP addresses.
- Confirm your privacy policy actually discloses what you are sharing with advertising partners.
- Confirm you have the consent you need for the specific data you are sending, not just for analytics in general.
- Check with whoever handles privacy for your business before the first upload, not after it.
Keep in mind, "exclude EEA users" is easy to say and harder to do. Most CRM exports do not carry a reliable country field on every record. If you cannot cleanly separate European customers out of your list, the safe answer is to leave these two columns empty.
One More Thing Worth Noticing
Search Engine Land also caught a quiet wording change across Google's help pages. Customer data is now described as information advertisers "collected" rather than information they "shared."
That is one word, and the kind of edit that never gets announced. I am not going to tell you what it means legally, because I do not know. I will say that when a platform changes how it describes the source of your data at the same time it asks for more of that data, read the terms rather than skimming them.
What I Would Actually Do
Here is the process for most accounts.
- Leave the two new columns alone for now. Your existing email and phone uploads still work. Nothing broke.
- Measure your current match rate first. If you are already matching 70 percent of your list, the upside here is small and the privacy exposure is not.
- Get an answer on consent before you test. Not a guess. An actual answer from whoever owns privacy at your business.
- Test on one segmented list if you do move forward. Keep it US-only, keep it small, and compare the match rate against the same list without the new fields.
Most small and mid-sized advertisers will get more out of cleaning up the data they already upload than out of adding IP addresses. If your customer list is full of stale emails and missing phone numbers, fixing that moves your match rate more than a new column will. My guide to using first-party data in Google Ads covers how to get that list in shape.
This lands right after Google Data Manager picked up a data strength uplift metric. Google wants more of your customer data, and it is building more ways to show you what that data is worth.
Question to Answer:
Can you reliably exclude every EEA, UK, and Switzerland customer from a list export today, and do you have documented consent to send unhashed IP addresses to Google?
In Summary
Customer Match now accepts user IP addresses and interaction timestamps as matching signals. Both must be uploaded unhashed, and neither is available in the EEA, the UK, or Switzerland.
The feature can improve your match rates, but it asks for data you were never required to hand over before. Go check your consent situation first, and if you cannot cleanly exclude European users from your exports, skip these two columns entirely. The rest of the Customer Match setup works exactly as it did before.
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