The new customer acquisition goal enables you to efficiently acquire new customers through your 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 2 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).
Learn how to Set up new customer acquisition reporting.
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 won’t 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 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 more About 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.
Types of customer lifecycle goals
Below are the different types of customer lifecycle goals available in Google Ads for Search, Shopping, and Performance Max campaigns.
| Goal | Mode | Eligible campaign types | Bidding strategies | Conversion goal configuration |
| New Customer Acquisition |
New Customer Value Mode Bid higher for new customers than existing ones |
|
Value-based bidding: |
At least one Purchase conversion goal is required. |
|
New Customer Only Mode Only bid for new customers |
|
Value-based bidding: Cost-based bidding:
|
A Purchase conversion goal isn't required. |
How to generate a report on a new customer acquisition goal
- Sign in to your Search Ads 360 experience.
- Navigate to a Google Ads client account.
- Click Campaigns, from the left navigation panel.
- Click Columns
from the table toolbar.
- On the “Modify columns for campaigns” page, search “Google Ads new customer lifetime value”.
- Click Apply.
- Now, click Segment
from the table toolbar and select Conversions and then select New vs. returning customers.
- Choose a date range from the date range selector.
- Click Apply. You can view the report generated with the requisite details.
How Google distinguishes new customers from existing customers
There are 3 ways you can provide signals that help Google identify new customers for your business. You can use one or any combination of the 3. Google detection will always be used by default.
Google detected
Uploaded audience list
New customer conversion tracking using tags (add-on)
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'll 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).