Google Ads Help now lists “User IP address” as an unhashed column advertisers can drop straight into a Customer Match upload, on its own or paired with an interaction timestamp. The fallback line is the part worth reading twice: skip the timestamp, and the system defaults to the “latest known” user of that IP, not necessarily the person the advertiser logged. Search Engine Land reported the change on September 25, and PPC Land followed a day later with more detail on which markets sit outside it.
What the File Now Requires
The accepted header list for a Customer Match file now runs to eight columns: “Email,” “Phone,” “First Name,” “Last Name,” “Country,” “Zip,” “User IP address,” and “User Interaction timestamp.” Per Google’s help page for building the upload file, advertisers “only have to include data fields that you find relevant to your customers,” and a row can carry an IP with or without personal data, or personal data with or without an IP. One combination is rejected outright: “sending only a timestamp without an IP address or PII will trigger an error.”
Contact fields can be hashed by the advertiser or by Google Ads. IP addresses and timestamps are a different case: the page states that “IP addresses and timestamps should be unhashed.” Column header names, meanwhile, have to stay in English no matter which field they label.
What is IP matching in Customer Match?
IP matching lets an advertiser upload a customer’s raw, unhashed IP address as a Customer Match signal, either by itself or next to contact details such as an email or phone number. Google’s help page says the address is “captured at the exact moment of interaction,” and an optional timestamp column can record when that moment happened. IP matching does not apply to end users located in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland.
The Timestamp Fallback
Skip the timestamp and the fallback takes over: “If an IP address is uploaded without a timestamp, the system defaults to the ‘latest known’ user of that IP.” The page defines two kinds of timestamp an advertiser could send, an “earliest user timestamp” for the first recorded interaction from that address and a “last user timestamp” for the most recent one, but only names one column header for either, and it won’t take a timestamp without an IP: “A timestamp can’t be sent without an IP address.”
That one header shows up three different ways on the page: “User interaction timestamp” in the opening list, “User Engagement timestamp” under timestamp matching, and “User Interaction timestamp” again in the combined section. PPC Land flagged the same inconsistency in its writeup. Nothing on the page says which spelling the upload parser expects.
Where the API Already Had This
The Data Manager API has accepted IP data since May 28. Its release notes credit version 1.7, dated May 28, with having “added the composite_data field to the AudienceMember resource, which accepts a CompositeData object and lets you combine multiple types of identifiers, such as UserData and IpData.” Google’s developer blog described the same release as letting advertisers “send IP addresses in Google Ads Customer Match uploads using the new CompositeData field,” on its own or alongside an email or phone number.
The developer guide gives IpData two optional timestamp fields where the file upload has one, observeStartTime and observeEndTime, and recommends sending both “to help improve Customer Match match rates.” It also sets a timeline: “match rate improvements from these signals are expected to begin in October 2026.” The same API added a one-call way to wipe an entire audience list two months later, in July. One restriction the file upload page skips: IpData “isn’t supported for Display & Video 360 Customer Match uploads.”
No Announcement for the File Upload
Google hasn’t published a blog post for the file-upload change. For the file upload, Google’s only documentation is the help page, and it carries no visible date. That’s the same pattern GBRAID followed in July: a Help Center guide for carrying click IDs into offline conversion uploads also carried no visible publish date and surfaced through trade-press reporting.
