New customer acquisition goal
Also called New customer value, New customers only.
A Google Ads setting that adds a fixed extra value to conversions from people who are not already customers, or restricts bidding to them entirely. It runs on Maximize conversion value and Target ROAS, and it needs a way to tell new from existing, usually a customer list or your own tagging.
Why it matters
It is the one value lever Google hands you directly, and in lead generation it usually does less than it looks like it does. Nearly every lead in a lead-gen account is a new customer, so a flat amount added to nearly every conversion changes almost nothing about which lead the bidding prefers.
What goes wrong
Worth separating the two modes. Bidding higher for new customers adds your stated amount on top of the value you sent. Bidding only for new customers zeroes the rest. The first is a value change, the second is an exclusion, and they are often discussed as one setting.
The arithmetic is where lead generation differs from retail. If a $100 lead and a $1,000 lead both become new customers, adding $200 to each makes them $300 and $1,200: the order holds but the ratio falls from 10x to 4x, so the spread the bidding actually works with is narrower than the one you measured. In an ecommerce account, where a meaningful share of buyers are returning, the same rule separates two genuinely different groups. In a lead-gen account where 95% of leads are new, it is closer to a flat top-up.
The other half is the number itself. Google asks you to type a new customer value into a field, and most accounts answer it once, from memory, and never revisit it. That figure is doing the same job as a model multiplier, with none of the evidence behind it. If you are going to set it, set it from the same place a value model would: the difference in realised value between a first-time buyer and a repeat one, in your own closed business.
Deciding who counts as new is the part that quietly breaks. Google reads it from a customer list or from your tagging, and a customer list nobody has refreshed in a year marks long-standing customers as new. A CRM lifecycle field looks like the fix and is a different kind of trap: it is written after the outcome is known, so it is accurate in a report and empty on a lead that arrived an hour ago.
What this product does about it
Nothing here sets it for you, and the engine never reads a lifecycle or customer-status field as a factor: those fill in after the outcome is decided and are blank on every newly arrived lead, which is the one moment the value has to exist. If your model already prices new against existing from your own rows, adding the goal on top counts that once in the value and again in the bid.
How to check it on your own account
Work out what share of last quarter's leads were genuinely new customers. Above roughly 90% and the goal is a flat top-up that compresses your value spread rather than a signal; below it, check the customer list feeding it is still being updated.
Next to this
- Conversion value rulesA setting inside the ad platform that adjusts what a conversion is worth according to conditions such as location, device or audience, without changing the value you sent.
- Value spreadHow much the values you send differ from one another, usually read as the ratio between the top and the bottom of the range.
- Target ROASGoogle AdsMaximize conversion value with a return target attached.
- Flat feedA conversion feed where nearly every lead carries the same value, usually because no attribute in the data separated them.
The rest of this step
Measure this on your own data
The diagnostic reads a CRM export in your browser and reports your volume, your match rate and the spread between your leads against the thresholds in this glossary. Nothing is uploaded and no account is needed.