CEO at Profitmetrics.io | Help Agencies and E-Com stores Optimize with POAS© in Google Ads and Meta 🚀
Undocumented details on new customer goals in Pmax from Google Marketing Live! Google just announced a lot of new Pmax goals for new customers at Google Marketing Live. Their overall goal is to create a separate user journey for new and existing customers. For example, there will be promotions only for new customers and special prices for loyalty program customers. They are also testing internally if there could be individual assets just for new customers. It's a very interesting roadmap. I attended a roundtable in Dublin with the product lead for customer cycles and got a chance to ask a lot of detailed questions that are not documented anywhere. I wanted to share the answers, as some of them were unknown to me and others in the community. The first thing I asked was why there are so many unknowns when setting up new vs. existing customer tags in Google Ads and uploading existing customer lists, and not relying on cookies detection. The answer was that the unknowns are mostly unconsented users and iOS users. This is interesting because for iOS users, Google shifts out the Gclid that refers to both user and campaign data to GBraid and WBraid, which only refer to campaign-related data. We often see 30-40% unknowns even though best practices are followed. Another interesting answer is that the unknowns are treated in the algorithm as existing customers, which is useful to know. Google mentioned they would be testing if they could model the unknowns out. I then asked how important the new and existing customer variable in tags were for determining new and existing customers, as it is often limited in some platforms like Shopify, where the new pixel only provides data if users are logged in. The answer was very surprising! The parameter in the tag are mainly used to train the algorithm to verify that Google made the right prediction about whether it was a new customer. The determination happens already when a user enters the auction. My own interpretation of this is that the first-party existing customers list for customer match, in combination with enhanced conversion, is the most important signal for Google to determine if a customer is new or existing when they enter an auction. I asked if it would still work to have just two different conversion actions for new and existing customers and then update the value from the API if a customer is determined to be new or existing, as this provides a safer determination made by the customer's own backend data. The answer was that it would be the same, and the customer match list was the most important. So we will build into ProfitMetrics separate conversion actions now for new and existing customers in the coming month. These were very interesting and helpful answers from Google. I hope you can use the insights, and let me know if you have any questions.
Analytics Consulting | GTM, GA4, Server-Side Tracking | Performance Marketing | Meta, Google | Co-Founder Shopibuy
1moFrederik Thanks for sharing, very interesting! What about advertisers, who do not upload customer lists and only add the new vs returning parameter to the conversion tags? Does the importance of the parameter then change? It's kind of a worrying thing that the customer lists have this big relevance, as the legal aspect of uploading them can hold many advertisers back.