How Google Ads’ new NCA feature helps manage and measure the acquisition of new clients

Search is a standard tool in acquiring low funnel clients, as it is closely tied to purchasing. When consumers take the step of searching for a product or brand, they are intentional. This is even more true for brand name searches, which have the best profitability but target people already familiar with the brand, or even previous customers.

Until now, it has been difficult to develop new client acquisitions with Google Ads. Even if the goal is to get a good ROI or CPA, businesses are willing to pay more to get leads.

Recently, Google started offering a management system differentiating between those who have already made conversions and those who have not. This functionality, called NCA for New Customer Acquisition, has been requested now for many years. The only solution before was to build off of first party data, which made management more difficult.

This new feature was first available for Smart Shopping, then was also rolled out to new Performance Max campaigns.

This meant that at the beginning of the year, we were able to focus more on new customers for one of our retail clients. Thanks to this new feature, the Google algorithms take user data and prioritise internet users who have not purchased from their website.

The results have been very positive: the share of new clients has increased from 39% to 51%, with a 54% increase in new customer volumes with Performance Max, while reducing the cost of new customer acquisition by 30%.

We then rolled out NCA progressively to all Pmax campaigns. This option also recently became available on Search, so we plan to extend the coverage to all the campaigns that are managed by our data and digital agency, Artefact.

This new functionality opens up even more possible optimisations. We can now prioritise the acquisition of new customers according to our objective: if we want to increase the share of new customers, we just have to assign them a higher importance.

Search is constantly evolving and allows us to adapt our ads depending on the advertiser’s needs, taking full advantage of the Google tools that are available to us. It is therefore essential that we use and test new features so we can implement the best SEA strategies.