Optimize Your Campaigns With Google’s New Customer Acquisition Goal

Modern digital marketing is crowded. Myriad brands are jockeying for attention from potential customers in a space flooded with competition. On top of competing with other brands, you’re also trying to spend ad dollars effectively to reach the right audience. That’s what makes Google Ads’ new feature a game-changer for smart marketers. 

The New Customer Acquisition (NCA) goal in Google Ads is a tool that allows advertisers to optimize campaigns for acquiring new customers only, rather than simply anyone who clicks on an ad. However, it’s not plug-and-play: you’ll need to set it up to capture the right leads for your business. Below, we’ll guide you through how the New Customer Acquisition goal works and how you can leverage it for your campaigns. 

What Does the New Customer Acquisition Goal Do?

It might be easiest to start by defining the holes that New Customer Acquisition fills. We use Google’s conversion tags and customer list upload features to exclude all converters from our campaigns, preventing ads from targeting existing customers. Though effective in most cases, this method has limitations due to factors like audience size requirements.

With the new NCA goal, Google introduces more methods to classify customers as new or existing, helping you easily find and convert new prospects while staying organized. Here are some of the changes:

• Automatic detection: Potential customer detection is automatically enabled when you select the “new customer” acquisition goal. Google uses your conversion data from the last 540 days to create an audience of existing customers and will not consider those users in ad auctions.

• Customer list uploads: Advertisers can upload their own first-party data via customer match lists. Any user not found on those lists will be considered a new customer. Ideally, these lists should contain at least 1,000 users for matching purposes, but you can input fewer.

• Conversion tracking tags: Google has a new conversion tracking tag that will label each website conversion as “new,” “existing” or “unknown.” While this is the most technical method, it tends to be the most accurate. The tags can be implemented via the Global Site Tag on your website or by using Google Tag Manager.

It’s important to remember that none of these methods are 100% accurate due to tracking and privacy limitations. We recommend using a combination of these three methods if you want to limit ad spend on existing customers. Also, the definition of a “new” customer can vary by business/vertical, and it may not be a great idea to only optimize for new customers in all of your campaigns. 

What Does This Look Like for Marketing Campaigns?

 A quick-service restaurant, for example, may not want to remove an existing customer from its campaigns indefinitely, but just for a few weeks or months after a purchase. On the other hand, a replacement window company may want to remove existing customers for a few years, since new windows are a much higher investment and less frequently purchased item.

Using Google’s New Customer Acquisition goal can be particularly helpful for branded search campaigns—existing customers are likely to search your brand name if they need to contact you and can find your contact info easily, such as through your Google Business Profile or in the organic results.

Elevate Your Spend Tactics

Whether you’re looking to keep up with Google’s latest algorithm changes or want to know more about why audience segmentation matters to your marketing campaigns, we’ve got the insights you need to make informed choices when setting up campaigns. Looking for more ideas on how you can make your marketing work smarter? Reach out.