Troubleshooting the new customer acquisition goal

If your campaign isn’t optimizing to acquire new customers, here are a few common scenarios you may encounter and steps to troubleshoot.

On this page

• Lower than expected performance
• High proportion of returning customers
• High proportion of unknown customers

Lower than expected performance

Occasionally, Performance Max or Search campaigns using the new customer acquisition goal may serve fewer ads than expected. This may be due to incorrect campaign setup. Follow the steps below to troubleshoot.

Step 1 of 3: Confirm your campaign settings

1. In your Google Ads account, click the Campaigns icon .
2. Click the Campaigns drop down in the section menu.
3. Click Campaigns.
4. On the “Campaigns” page, find the Performance Max or Search campaign that you want to edit.
5. Click the gear icon beside the campaign name to open the “Settings” panel.
6. Expand the “Customer acquisition” section, and confirm that “Only bid for new customers” is checked.
7. Expand the “Customer acquisition” section, and confirm that:
   • The “Adjust your bidding to help you gain new customers” box is checked.
   • If you’ve selected to “Only bid for new customers” and are concerned about your performance not being optimized, we recommend to instead select “Bid higher for new customers (recommended)” as this will not limit the reach of your campaign.
   • If you’re concerned about your performance optimization after selecting “Only bid for new customers”, consider choosing “Bid higher for new customers (recommended)”. Bidding higher for new customers won’t limit the reach of your campaign.

Step 2 of 3: Confirm your conversion settings

1. Click the Goals icon from the left navigation panel.
2. Click the Conversions drop down in the section menu.
3. Click Summary.
4. For non-retail advertisers, confirm that the purchase conversions listed are within the last 30 days or have an existing customer user list added. You must use either of these options to enable a new customer acquisition goal.
5. If your new customer acquisition goal has been set up correctly, confirm when it was added to the campaign.
   • Performance Max and Search campaigns need 1-2 weeks to adjust to any significant changes made to a campaign. Your campaign may take time to adjust to this new targeting and optimization setting.
6. If there are no issues with setup, confirm that the Search campaign or Performance Max campaign has been set up correctly.

Step 3 of 3: Check your customer list match rates

In order for the NCA goal to be as accurate as possible when detecting new vs. existing customers, we recommend that advertisers use first-party data to supplement autodetection and the new vs existing customer parameter in your conversion tracking tag.

For advertisers that opt to use first in their NCA campaigns, Customer Match is one of the methods to provide a 1PD customer list. When advertisers use Customer Match, we want them to provide the best data to ensure we have high Match Rates to ensure that we are as accurate as possible when detecting if a user is new or existing. Match rate is defined as % of people matched across your first-party Customer Match list and Google users, after filtering out opted out users. You can check your advertisers's Customer Match match rates directly in Google Ads audience manager or in Google Ads Data Manager (by adding in the match rate column)

To bolster match rate, we suggest you follow best practices of supplying multiple match keys - including multiple email addresses (if applicable), phone number and zip code.

High proportion of returning or unknown customers

Refer to Measure your lifecycle goals campaigns for more information on why customers are reported as unknown or returning, and how to improve the situation.