In late September 2026 Google Ads added IP address and interaction timestamp as new signals to Customer Match, expanding the upload format to eight columns. The change lets advertisers attach an unhashed IP address (and optionally a timestamp) to each record so Google has an additional way to resolve a customer list to real users. Search Engine Land documented the update as Google adding IP address and timestamp matching to Customer Match, with the Data Manager help page picking up the new column headers around September 27.
For B2B SaaS the headline is smaller than it looks, and the fine print is where the decision lives. IP is a noisier identifier than email, and the feature carries a hard geographic exclusion that removes exactly the audience many SaaS companies care about. This guide covers what actually changed, how the identifier behaves, why the EEA, UK, and Switzerland carve-out matters more for B2B than for retail, and the narrow set of cases where uploading IP data is worth the effort rather than a distraction from the audiences that already work.
What actually changed in the upload format
Customer Match has always matched on hashed first-party identifiers: email, phone number, and mailing address. The September 2026 update keeps all of those and adds two new columns, User IP address and User interaction timestamp, bringing the supported header count to eight. The critical technical detail is that the IP and timestamp are sent unhashed, unlike email and phone which must be SHA-256 hashed before upload. An IP address can be either IPv4 or IPv6, and a timestamp may not be supplied on its own; it only has meaning attached to an IP.
The timestamp changes how a match resolves. If you upload an IP with no timestamp, Google matches it to the latest known user of that address, which in a shared-network B2B context could be any employee behind a corporate gateway. Supplying a timestamp lets Google tie the record to the first or most recent observed interaction from that IP, narrowing the match to the user who was actually active at that moment. That distinction is the whole reason the timestamp exists: without it, IP matching in an office environment resolves to the wrong person often enough to add noise rather than reach. PPC Land noted the reach comes with strings, with the feature excluding users in 32 countries from IP matching entirely.
The EEA, UK, and Switzerland exclusion is the real story
IP-based matching is not supported for end users in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland. That is the 30 EEA member states plus the UK and Switzerland, and for a B2B SaaS company it is the difference between a useful feature and a non-event. Retail advertisers with a domestic customer base may barely notice the carve-out; a SaaS company selling into London, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Zurich will find that a large slice of its customer and prospect lists is simply ineligible for IP matching, no matter how clean the data is.
The practical consequence is that you cannot treat IP matching as an account-wide uplift. You have to segment your lists by the jurisdiction of the contact and expect incremental reach only on the non-European portion. For a US-headquartered SaaS with mostly North American customers, that may still be most of the list; for a European or globally balanced SaaS, the eligible fraction may be too small to matter. Before building any of this, pull the country distribution of the lists you would actually upload. If the majority sits inside the excluded region, the correct decision is to skip IP matching and keep optimizing the audiences you already run, such as the CRM-sourced lists covered in our guide to Google Ads audience targeting for B2B SaaS.
Why IP is a weak identifier in B2B specifically
IP address is inherently a coarser signal than a hashed email, and B2B conditions make it coarser still. In an office, dozens or hundreds of employees share a single public IP behind a corporate gateway, so an IP without a precise timestamp resolves ambiguously. Residential ISPs rotate dynamic IPs on a schedule, so the address you captured at signup may belong to a different household by the time you upload it. VPNs and corporate proxies, which are far more common among software buyers than the general population, mask the real address entirely. Each of these degrades match precision in ways that hashed email does not suffer.
This matters because a noisy audience signal does not just fail to help, it can actively dilute a well-tuned list. If you are running a suppression list to exclude existing customers from acquisition campaigns, a mismatched IP that pulls in the wrong user weakens the exclusion. If you are targeting an account-based list, imprecise IP resolution spends budget on people who are not your buyers. Because Customer Match matches on the strongest available signal, the safe way to use IP is as a supplement to hashed email and phone, never as a replacement, and only where you can pair it with a timestamp. For lists that are already small, revisit our note on the 100-user audience minimum for B2B SaaS before assuming any new identifier will lift match volume.
The narrow cases where it is worth it
There are two situations where uploading IP data earns its keep. The first is account-based marketing against named target accounts whose corporate IP ranges you can reliably associate. If you know the office IP blocks for a shortlist of enterprise accounts, IP matching can help you reach or exclude users on those networks in a way email lists alone may miss, especially for signed-out users. The second is high-value suppression, where even a modest reach gain on excluding current customers or churned accounts protects acquisition budget and improves the signal your bidding learns from.
In both cases the prerequisite is that you already collect IP at the point of data capture, with a documented lawful basis and a clear consent posture, and that the contacts sit outside the EEA, UK, and Switzerland. If you have that data governance in place, adding IP columns to an existing Customer Match upload through Google Ads Data Manager is a low-cost experiment. If you do not, building IP capture from scratch purely to feed this feature is rarely justified given how much stronger your hashed email and CRM audiences already are. Do not confuse this audience feature with measurement work such as enhanced conversions, which improves attribution rather than reach and belongs on a different part of your roadmap.
Privacy and governance before you upload anything
Because IP and timestamp are uploaded unhashed, they get a different level of scrutiny than the hashed identifiers you may already send. An IP address is personal data under most privacy frameworks, and the fact that Google excludes EEA, UK, and Switzerland users is itself a signal about where the regulatory risk sits. Before any upload, confirm that your privacy policy and consent flows cover using IP data for advertising matching, that you are not uploading records for excluded jurisdictions, and that your data retention and deletion processes extend to the IP fields. This is a legal and data-governance review, not just a technical one.
It is also worth noting what did not change. This update is about audience matching, not conversion measurement, and it does not alter your consent mode setup, your enhanced conversions configuration, or your offline conversion imports. Those remain the backbone of how a B2B SaaS account feeds signal to Smart Bidding, and they are unaffected by the Customer Match change. If your measurement foundation needs attention, that is a higher-leverage place to spend effort than a marginal audience-matching gain; our overview of the offline conversion stack for B2B SaaS and our guide to Consent Mode v2 and enhanced conversions lay out where the real returns are.
The bottom line for B2B SaaS accounts
Customer Match IP matching is a genuine expansion of first-party audience options, but for most B2B SaaS accounts it is a niche tool, not a priority. The EEA, UK, and Switzerland exclusion removes a large part of many SaaS lists, IP is a noisy identifier that shared corporate networks and VPNs degrade further, and the feature only helps where you already collect clean IP data with a solid consent basis. Treated as a supplement to hashed email on account-based or suppression lists for non-European contacts, it can add incremental reach. Treated as a reason to go build IP capture, it is a distraction from audiences and measurement that already deliver.
If you want a clear read on whether this change is worth acting on for your specific list geography and data setup, a Two Spouts Google Ads audit reviews your Customer Match audiences and first-party data plumbing as part of a line-by-line account review, and you can start with the free 10-point audit to see where the quick wins are before committing to any new identifier.