Machine learning and automation is all the rage in the digital media industry at the moment, and it is no surprise that Google is at the centre of this. Their automated campaign solution, Performance Max, came out a short while back and is now supercharged with a new feature that allows us to drive new customer sales.
Performance Max
For anyone who hasn't heard of Performance Max, it is a goal-based campaign type that allows advertisers to access pretty much all of Google’s ad inventory from a single campaign, and uses machine learning to optimise performance towards a specific goal that is set for that campaign.
It takes quite a bit of the manual work out of campaign planning and management such as audience research, channel selection and budget optimisation. All advertisers have to do is provide the creatives, set basic campaign parameters such as the budget, duration, location and campaign goal (e.g. target CPA or ROAS), and Google will compute vast amounts of data in real-time to determine the best combination of audience, placement and creative that will deliver the best results based on the goal that is set.
New Customer Acquisition
Google will now be adding a ‘new customer acquisition’ goal to online sales and lead generation objectives within Performance Max campaigns. This feature allows us to optimise our campaign by bidding higher on new customers or exclusively bidding on new customers only.
Customer acquisition is key to short and long term business growth. New customers generate fresh revenue for businesses and grow a brand’s customer base. This also creates opportunities for repeat purchases and customer referrals.
Customer acquisition strategies have been around for a while now. Traditionally, advertisers would provide media partners with an anonymised and encrypted list of existing customers to be excluded from their ad campaign. This means that their ads will only be served to new customers. The effectiveness of this is highly dependent on the ‘match rate’, which is the ability of the media partner to identify the advertiser’s customers in their database. The use of customer lists is a great way to organise our marketing campaigns into new customer acquisition, upsell and retention strategies.
The new feature on Google’s Performance Max just makes new customer acquisition easier to do at scale. It allows advertisers to set a specific goal for new customer acquisition, using the custom metric Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), and the standard ROI metric. It also provides advertisers the ability to monitor performance and optimise across both new and existing customers from a single campaign view.
Activating the New Customer Acquisition Feature
Here’s Google’s 4 step process to activating new customer acquisition on onlines sales and lead generation objectives in Performance Max:
There are 3 ways to provide Google with the necessary signals to be able to identify and differentiate new customers from existing customers,
Provide existing customer lists through Customer Match (highly recommended).
Google detected signals. This refers to Google Ads conversion tracking and audience list creation.
New Customer conversion tracking using tags. This requires additional setup from the advertiser as they would need to create specific conversion tags for new customers, but it gives the advertiser more control in identifying new conversions.
Configure new customer acquisition goal within Conversions Summary in the account that owns the conversion action. This could be an individual Google ads client account or a manager account.
Activate new customer acquisition in your campaign.
View Reporting.
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