Google Ads seems to be experimenting with setting the New Customer Value within New Customer Acquisition campaigns without the consent of the advertiser. Technically, New Customer Value can be turned off, but this is confusing some advertisers and impacting reporting and ad performance for some.
Update: Google told me that values aren't being changed without advertiser consent.
This was posted by Bilal Yasin on LinkedIn who wrote, "Without any heads-up, and without it being in the change history, a new customer value has suddenly been applied to a customer. It was set to 200 DKK. One thing is that Google has assigned a value, but another is that I can't remove it again!"
Here is that screenshot:
Bilal added, "This means that for every new customer Google claims I get through Google Ads, 21.88 DKK is being added to the revenue figure." She added:
This is a problem for several reasons:
- Google doesn't know the value of new customers
- The revenue is artificially too high
- Most of the conversions that come in are still listed as 'unknown' anyway
Ginny Marvin, Google's Ads Liaison, replied saying this is an experiment. "This guidance is part of an experiment aimed at helping advertisers use settings that will improve results—specifically, to increase new customer ratios—when setting New Customer Value within New Customer Acquisition campaigns," she wrote.
Here is the full response:
This guidance is part of an experiment aimed at helping advertisers use settings that will improve results—specifically, to increase new customer ratios—when setting New Customer Value within New Customer Acquisition campaigns.When the New Customer Value is set too low, or not set at all, it prevents the campaign from properly optimizing to find high-value new customers.
If you're not sure what value to set, we’ll suggest a default value in the UI (based on historical conversion data), or you can test with the recommended 2x your average order value.
We also understand reporting concerns. If you’re setting low values for NCA reporting purposes, you can simply turn NCA on/off to unlock reporting. We will be introducing new customer reporting for all purchase conversion campaigns in the next couple of quarters. Stay tuned for more on that in the coming months.
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.
