Google Ads New Customer Acquisition Report: The Bidding-Safe Split

Last week Google Ads quietly dropped a new setting inside the Customer Acquisition menu that most PPC managers have been asking for since 2023. The option is called Report on new customers acquired, and it does one job. It gives you the New customers and New customer value columns in your reporting without changing how your Smart Bidding algorithm behaves. No hack, no fake $0.01 bid modifier, no bidding side effects. Just clean measurement.

Google did not announce this in a blog post. The setting was spotted by Vasant Chaudhary and shared publicly by Thomas Eccel, and Relevant Audience wrote the clearest early breakdown of what the setting actually does. For years, the only clean way to get a new-customer split in Google Ads was to enable Bid higher for new customers with a $0.01 value, which technically nudged bidding. Now there is a third option that is measurement only, which is what most operators actually needed the whole time.

This post walks through what the new customer acquisition report changes, why the old workaround was clumsy, and the two-minute setup that turns it on cleanly.

What the New Customer Acquisition Report Actually Adds

The new customer acquisition report is a third checkbox inside the Customer Acquisition section of your campaign settings. Before this month, you had two choices in that menu. You could Bid higher for new customers, which raised bids on users Google thought had not bought from you before. Or you could Bid for new customers only, which restricted bidding to that segment. Both changed how the algorithm placed bids, which meant your CPA and volume moved when you flipped the switch.

The new option is called Report on new customers acquired. It sits alongside the older two. Turning it on adds two columns to your Google Ads reports: New customers and New customer value. The tag payload from your conversions is what Google uses to classify each purchase as new or returning. Nothing about your bid strategy shifts. Your CPA target stays the same, your ROAS target stays the same, and your traffic mix stays the same.

Google’s own documentation for lifecycle goals confirms the mechanics on the reporting side. If you have activated the new customer acquisition goal in a campaign optimizing toward Purchase conversions, the New vs returning customers segment appears in your Campaigns table, and the New customers and New customer value metrics appear as available columns. The lifecycle goals documentation is the primary source for the column names and the requirements.

Why the Old Workaround Was a Compromise

The $0.01 workaround worked, but it always came with a trade-off. Setting Bid higher for new customers at one cent looked like a no-impact setting on the surface. In practice, the smallest possible new-customer bid boost still counted as a bidding signal to the algorithm. Some accounts saw a slight lift in new-customer volume. Others saw nothing measurable. The point is that the algorithm was doing something, even if it was small.

That mattered for two kinds of operators. First, agencies running strict ROAS or CPA optimization for clients who did not want the bid model touched. If you were paid to hit a target, and the target moved because someone toggled a customer-acquisition setting, that was a problem. Second, in-house teams running incremental measurement or clean tests. You could not run a proper A/B on a new-customer segment while the algorithm was quietly nudging bids for that same segment.

The new customer acquisition report solves both cases. The setting is measurement only. The columns appear. Nothing bids differently. Eccel described the setting on LinkedIn as measurement only with no bidding algorithm impact, which is the entire reason it exists. Reporters at Search Engine Roundtable and Relevant Audience both confirm the same read.

How the New Customer Acquisition Report Fits Lifecycle Goals

Google reorganized its customer acquisition menu into lifecycle goals in late 2025. The lifecycle goals framework covers new customer acquisition, high-value new customers, returning customers, lapsed customers, and high-value lapsed customers. Each one has its own segment and its own set of columns. Turning on a lifecycle goal in a campaign is what unlocks the corresponding segment and columns in reporting.

The new customer acquisition report is the first setting inside that framework that is explicitly measurement only. The other lifecycle goal settings still affect bidding when you turn them on. High-value new customers, for example, raises bids for the customers Google thinks will spend more. Lapsed customers can raise bids for users who bought before but have not come back. If you want to report on those segments without touching bidding, you now have a template for how Google plans to structure that. It would not be a surprise to see the same measurement-only option show up under high-value new, returning, or lapsed segments in the next few months.

For accounts that already run value-based bidding, this is a clean addition. You can keep your Target ROAS or Maximize Conversion Value strategy intact and layer a new-customer view on top of it without any algorithm interference.

Who Should Turn on the New Customer Acquisition Report

Three profiles get the most from this setting.

First, ecommerce accounts that report new-customer performance up to a client, a board, or a marketing lead. If you were resisting the $0.01 bid mod because you did not want Google’s algorithm nudging your Smart Bidding, this replaces that pressure with a clean split. Your monthly deck can now show new-customer counts and value alongside your normal ROAS numbers.

Second, agencies running strict CPA or ROAS accounts where the client is sensitive to any change that could move performance. Turn on the report, brief the client that the columns are measurement only, and start showing new-customer trends by campaign. If you want to make measurement discipline part of the retainer, this pairs well with call tracking software that already gives you a first-party view of new versus repeat callers. The two views triangulate each other.

Third, operators running nightly Google Ads anomaly workflows or scripted reporting pipelines. The New customers and New customer value columns are now first-party fields you can pull, which means the segment does not need custom label logic in a spreadsheet. Add the columns to the pull, feed them into your dashboard, and stop maintaining the parallel new-customer proxy metric your team probably built.

The Two-Minute Setup for the New Customer Acquisition Report

Here is the sequence. Do this once per campaign that runs Purchase conversions.

First, confirm you are optimizing toward Purchase conversions. The new customer acquisition report does not work for non-purchase conversions and does not work for Floodlight purchase conversions. If your campaign runs on Lead form conversions or offline conversion imports without a Purchase tag, this setting will not do anything. Fix that first if you need to.

Second, install the new customer acquisition parameter on your conversion tag. This is the customer_type parameter that tells Google whether a conversion was a new or existing customer. Google’s setup docs cover the Google tag, Google Tag Manager, Shopify, Firebase, Google Analytics, and offline conversion imports. Pick the flow that matches your setup and use Tag Assistant to confirm the parameter fires with the value Google expects.

Third, open the campaign settings, scroll to Customer Acquisition, and select Report on new customers acquired. That is the new option. It is not the same as the two older options. Save the campaign.

Fourth, add the New customers and New customer value columns to your Campaigns table. Click Columns, find the customer lifecycle group, and enable both. The columns start populating the next time your conversion data flows in.

Fifth, confirm the segment. Add the New vs returning customers segment to a report and check that you now see the new-customer split by campaign. If the numbers look zero across the board, the customer_type parameter is not firing on your conversions. Go back to step two.

What the New Customer Acquisition Report Does Not Do

A few things worth saying out loud.

The setting does not backfill. Historical conversions before you install the customer_type parameter do not retroactively get labeled new or returning. Your first month of data after enabling will have limited depth. Plan around that in any monthly report you build off of it.

The setting does not migrate your existing $0.01 workaround. If you have Bid higher for new customers set to one cent today, the new option does not automatically turn that off. Eccel said the new setting will replace the workaround, but neither Google nor the sources say whether Google will migrate accounts. Assume you need to review each campaign and disable the old bid modifier yourself if you want a clean split. Your ROAS and CPA will likely twitch when you do, because you are removing the small bidding nudge that was there before. Watch the first week.

The setting does not have a rollout timetable. Google has not published an announcement or a schedule. Some accounts have the option today, some do not. The only reliable check is to open your own Customer Acquisition menu and look for the third checkbox. If it is not there yet, come back in two weeks.

The setting does not fix broken conversion tracking. If your Purchase conversions are firing on the wrong pages, double-firing, or missing the customer_type parameter, this new option cannot repair that. Many accounts got sloppy after last year’s terms of service change to conversion label handling, and a clean measurement layer will not help if the raw signal is dirty. Broader accountability issues we covered in why AI marketing measurement is broken apply here.

If you want a second set of eyes on your conversion setup and your Customer Acquisition configuration this week, book a free consultation with our paid search team and we will walk through the audit with you. This is exactly the kind of quiet Google release that pays off for accounts with someone paying attention, and it sits right alongside the other two audits we have been running with clients this month, the Aug 17 Smart Bidding change and the Sept 1 AI Max migration. Let’s Grow!