Google ads has released a new bidding method for its smart shopping campaigns that allows you to target new customers… kind of.
The way that the new bidding method works is when a sale is made Google determines if the sale is from a new or a customer that has purchased from you before or is a new customer. It can use its own data, you can tag your site to help this or you can upload customer data straight to google to determine the customer status.
If a new customer sale is more valuable than buying the same product as a returning customer you can add a bit more onto the cost per acquisition target.
So if a returning customer purchases a product for £100 and the new customer bought the same product you could specify an extra value in the new customer based on your life time value so you could say to google a £100 sale to a new customer is worth £110 to you business. This gives the algorithm a bit more of a CPA target to find more sales.
Is this a valuable tool or a sneaky way of increasing CPA targets? I’m not sure we will run it and see the results