Acquiring new customers through effective Google Ads to help a business grow and scale is often a main focus for most marketing goals. With this in mind, our blog post focuses on a feature Google has introduced which is the new customer acquisition feature.
This focuses on driving increased levels of new customers whilst using the budget effectively to lower the cost per acquisition and improve return on ad spend (ROAS). The key to the new feature is ensuring it has been set up correctly within the campaign to give accurate and trackable results.
There are two parts to the new customer acquisition feature which both will be covered in our blog post below. Along with providing advice and support to help with your Google Ads targeting to drive increased enquiries, conversions and sales through new customers.
New Customer Focus
If your business is looking to generate new enquiries or an e-commerce business with products wanting to drive sales from a new audience, then the new customer acquisition feature available for Performance Max campaigns and Search Ads could suit your marketing objectives.
Whilst Google Ads are an impactful tool for remarketing audiences to bring in repeat business or increased customer value, for some businesses it can be that they want to focus purely on new customers. Plus, there could be more value in gaining a new customer. Therefore it could result in wasted ad spend by targeting products or services towards audience segments who may already return to make future purchases or are not a marketing focus right now.
This allows businesses and their Google Ads audience to specifically utilise their budget and targeting efforts to focus on new customers and carefully track the success of that Google Ads campaign. This works by looking at how many new customers it brought in and their new customer lifetime value.
New Customers vs. Existing Customers
There are 3 ways in which Google will be able to identify if your Google Ads are being shown to the right target audiences for new customers. Firstly, is from first party information provided by your business with customer lists, so it knows specifically who not to target as they have already had previous interaction with the company.
This is important to include when setting up the Google Ads targeting in your Google Ads account so it doesn’t show incorrect results for return on ad spend (ROAS). Such as incorrectly showing a new customer result which may be tracked as a higher value, but actually was an existing customer. For precise performance metrics, this is an essential stage to complete when setting up the campaign.
Previous Findings And Tracking
Another way in which Google will be able to identify relevant data segments to target people who specifically would be new customers to your business is by looking at past data from previous campaigns. Take the opportunity to leverage Google’s machine learning of automatic detection of past conversion data to create a list of existing customers.
It is recommended that this looks over the last 540 days to give an extensive overview and the widest exclusion of past customers. Doing this allows for the new customer acquisition feature to maximise the ad spend to be focused purely on reaching people who are yet to make an enquiry or purchase but who are looking for your products or services in the relevant segments.
Another element which is important as part of the setup is including the right conversion tracking tags, labelling each conversion as a ‘new customer’ or ‘existing customer’. This in turn will help with campaign performance, accurate results and therefore an improved return on investment.
Maximise Number Of New Customers
With the new customer audience feature to achieve the highest impact with your ad spend to drive the best number of new customers with the budget available, optimising bidding is an essential part.
Looking at the results in real time to understand for your strategy planning for future bidding and adjustments, to further improve the campaign results.
This can include analysing user behaviours and the likelihood of converting. Taking the time to deep dive into the results of your Google Ads and adjusting the bidding strategy and audience segmentation accordingly to improve the return on ad spend and to help drive more new customers.
New Customer Value Mode
As part of the new customer acquisition feature businesses (to note, it is not applicable for store goals) can go a step further and decide to give a lower priority to returning customers if viewed they are as less valuable than a new customer.
Defining a value attribute for new customers allows companies to bid higher towards specifically reaching new customers which are viewed as high value new customers.
This allows for Google Ads campaigns to be extremely targeted with their focus and clearly define the right approach to suit the campaign and goals looking to achieve. In this case, if looking to bid higher towards reaching new customers.
Measure Success
The new customer acquisition feature is a fantastic addition to the targeting methods available when setting up a new Google Ads campaign to be precise and goal driven with your marketing spend. With all campaigns measuring success is one of the vital elements to continuously take learnings and create further testing.
As part of this, it is recommended within the results to look at ‘new customers’ and ‘new customer lifetime value’ as part of the campaign performance metrics. This will help when analysing the results to identify the level of success achieved in bringing in increased levels of new customers and their value to the business.
From this reporting, it will also help to identify the return on ad spend achieved, and if there have been improvements versus other Google Ad campaigns currently running or previously. Measuring the success will also identify if there have been any set up issues that need addressing to deliver accurate results going forward.
How Can We Help?
We hope our blog post has been useful to understand more about the new customer acquisition feature for Google Ads and how it can benefit your Google Ads. With a definitive focus on bringing in new customers either with enquiries or sales, making the most of your return on ad spend.
At PPCHQ we are a Google Partner giving us the right tools, knowledge and experience to ensure Google Ads are set up correctly and run effectively to deliver impactful results. We know what is needed to drive increased conversions, enquiries and sales through successful Google Ads.
We are more than happy to discuss how we can help or provide a free review of your existing Google Ads campaign, to help identify areas that could be improved to achieve higher results for your business. Please feel free to get in touch with one of our PPC specialists who would be happy to help.
