The new customer acquisition goal enables you to efficiently acquire new customers through your Google Ads campaigns. You have an option to either optimize the campaign to bid higher for new customers or optimize the campaign to exclusively bid for new customers only.
Primary marketing goals related to customer acquisition are:
- Growing overall revenue, but optimizing for conversions from new customers, as new customers bring long-term revenue to a business.
- Growing market share with a dedicated budget for customer acquisition, either maximizing the number of new customer conversions with a Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), or maximizing the revenue from new customers to also meet near-term return on investment (ROI).
New customer acquisition offers two modes to support these goals:
- Bid higher for new customers than for existing customers (New Customer Value mode): Add additional new customer acquisition value for a customer’s first purchase conversion value. This is the recommended mode, as it lets you maximize revenue across all customers while also driving more new customers to your business within a single campaign.
- Only bid for new customers (New Customer Only mode): Limit ads to only customers who’re new to your business (as determined based on historical purchases + existing customer lists you have uploaded in Google Ads). Google recommends this option only if you have dedicated acquisition-focused budgets, or you’re running a non-purchase, conversion-focused campaign (for example, lead-gen).
Note:
- To use the New Customer acquisition goal, you must set up Google Ads tags. Learn how to set up the new customer acquisition goal.
- The New Customer acquisition goal is not yet available if you're using a Google Ads Conversion Tracking goal with data sharing between Search Ads 360 and Google Ads turned on.
Benefits
- Higher share of new customer conversions, thus growing your business and driving longer-term revenue
- Efficient budget utilization for new customer acquisition, leading to lower acquisition costs
- Easy to set up and use
- Reporting on new vs. returning customer conversions
The new customer acquisition goal will not optimize for sensitive content such as alcohol or medical products. Conversions for this content will be set as “unknown” instead of “new” or “returning” in your report. Other content in your account may still be eligible to participate in new customer goals.
If you sell sensitive products, the only way to report on new customers is to provide the information in your conversion tag. Learn more about Google’s personalized advertising policies.
To activate new customer acquisition in Google Ads for advertisers with online sales (feed and non-feed) and lead generation objectives, follow the instructions in this article.
Bidding
New Customer Value mode (applicable only for purchase conversions)
Smart Bidding accounts for the new customer value you set and maximizes total conversion value, including the additional value you specify for new customers. Smart Bidding factors the understanding that new customers help drive more overall value into bidding decisions.
If you’re unsure what your new customer value should be, you can use the recommended value that’s set as default when you select the new customer acquisition goal.
Learn how to set up the new customer acquisition goal so you can maximize new customer acquisition in your Performance Max campaign bidding.
New Customer Only mode
In this mode, existing customers are excluded from bidding, and Smart Bidding optimizes towards your Max Conversions/tCPA or Max Conversion Value/tROAS bidding strategies.
Customer acquisition value
Customer acquisition value is the additional value adjustment to be added to a new customer’s first purchase conversion. Google recommends setting the Customer acquisition value such that Customer acquisition value, plus new customer's typical first purchase value, represents the revenue that a typical new customer would bring over their lifetime. When you choose a value-based bid strategy, you can use this total value as the basis to set your ROAS targets. Customer acquisition value is only used by campaigns that use value-based bidding strategies.
Customer acquisition value is different from customer acquisition cost, which is the amount spent on acquiring new customers and is calculated using cost for the campaign divided by number of new customers.
How Google distinguishes new customers from existing customers
There are three ways you can provide signals that help Google identify new customers for your business. You can use one or any combination of the three. Google detection will always be used by default.
Google detected
If your Google Ads conversion tracking is set to track “purchases”, Google can automatically create an audience list based on up to the past 540 days of campaign activity and tracked purchases.
- This is the easiest method for distinguishing new customers from existing customers, but it’s less comprehensive, since users can remove cookies and opt out.
- This is automatically used when you select the “new customer” acquisition goal.
Uploaded audience list
To create and upload your customer list, follow the instructions on using Customer Match. Then follow these steps:
- Sign into Google Ads where cross-account conversion tracking has been set up.
- Click the tools and settings icon
.
- Under "Measurement", click Conversions. In the "Conversions Summary" menu, click Edit in the "Customer acquisition" section.
- You’ll find the audience lists you’ve uploaded in the “Existing customers definition” box, or you can search for your audience list by typing the list name in the search field and selecting the box beside the correct list.
- Select up to 5 audience lists.
- Click Apply.
New customer conversion tracking using tags (add-on)
You can set up new customer conversion tracking using tagging. This method requires more setup from you, but it allows greater control over which conversions are reported as new or returning. Learn more about new customer reporting.
"Unknown" Google-detected classification
Google-detected classification is set to “Unknown” if most of your uploaded audience lists aren't shared with the Google Ads account attached to your Performance Max campaign. Share your uploaded audience lists to view your customer segmentation.
Google tag, Google Tag Manager or Firebase classifications
If you use new customer conversion tracking in the Google tag, Google Tag Manager, or Firebase, Google uses the values provided in the tag for “new”, “returning”, or “unknown" customers instead of Google autodetection.
Conversions from existing customers in “New Customer Only” mode
Even when you choose to bid for only new customers, there may be conversions from returning or existing customers that will be used towards your bidding goals. This may occur if:
- Google Ads isn’t able to identify an existing customer (for example, an existing customer is using a new or unrecognized device/browser).
- There are multiple conversions attributed to the same ad click. In this case, all conversions and conversion value are considered towards your bidding goals (like max conversions or max conversion value, among others).
Troubleshooting for the new customer acquisition goal
New customer acquisition is not running or has low serving
- Navigate to the Performance Max campaign’s settings.
- Click to expand the Customer acquisition section.
- Confirm that the “New customers only” setting has been enabled and the “Optimize campaign for acquiring new customers” box is checked.
- Ensure the Conversion page is set up correctly.
- Click the tools and settings icon
- Under “Measurement”, click Conversions.
- “New customer acquisition” will appear at the top or bottom of the page, depending on the goals of the campaign.
- NCA will be at the top of the page if purchase conversions are set up in the account.
- NCA will be at the bottom of the page if purchase conversions aren’t set up.
- If NCA doesn’t appear in the Conversion page, then NCA has not been set up correctly.
- For non-retail advertisers, confirm if purchase conversions are within the past 30 days or have an existing customer user list added.
- Advertisers must use either of these options to use NCA.
- If NCA has been set up correctly, check to see when NCA was added to the campaign.
- Performance Max campaigns need 1 to 2 weeks to adjust to any significant changes made to a campaign. Once NCA is enabled, the campaign may take time to adjust to this new targeting and optimization setting.