October 8, 2021
The Ideal QA Process in Digital Advertising
There’s no question that evaluating the impact of your marketing efforts on new customer acquisition is essential to growing your business. New customers drive new revenue and represent potential for future repeat purchases. However, successfully measuring the impact of your new customer brand awareness efforts often isn’t an easy task.
While you can associate marketing spend with new customer acquisition data through integrations between marketing platforms and backend tracking systems, setup for these integrations is usually complicated and time consuming. By using Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSAs) and Customer Match audiences, however, you can segment out new customers from your current customers in your search campaigns and easily track new customer performance data. The goal of this strategy is to exclude past customer traffic, leaving the designated new customer acquisition (NCA) campaigns with only new customer data.
Benefits of New Customer Acquisition Campaigns
Having the ability to segment out new customer data holds many benefits. These include:
- Separate budget allocation
- Ability to target new customers with tailored ad copy language
- Control over settings adjustments (e.g. device, location bid adjustments, etc.)
Overall, these are levers that can be pulled to drive additional progress toward the goals of your business.
How to Create New Customer Acquisition Campaigns
Follow these steps to create New Customer Acquisition (NCA) campaigns.
- Start by creating RLSA and Customer Match audiences around past converters. There is no exact number of audiences that need to be created. Depending on how you want to set up your campaigns, you may want to separate out 30, 60, and 540 day converters, or you may want to separate out converters based on what products they purchased. If you’re able to extract past customer emails from your backend system, those can be uploaded as a Customer Match audience. Customer Match audiences should be refreshed every one to two weeks to ensure that past customer data is up to date.
2. Next, create a copy of the campaigns that will be tracking new customer performance data. Here, the new customer focused campaigns are denoted with ‘NCA’ for easy performance evaluation:
3. Exclude the converter audiences (RLSA, Customer Match, or both) created in the first step from the new NCA campaigns. This will filter only new customers to your NCA campaigns.
4. Apply a slight bid increase to NCA campaigns to give those campaigns priority over the original campaigns. After a few days (to avoid cutting off traffic), you should add the RLSA and/or Customer Match audiences to your original campaign as Target+Bid audiences. This will change the original campaign to only target your past converters. Going forward, if a past converter searches a targeted term in these campaigns, they will be excluded from the NCA campaign and shown an ad from the original campaign. If a new customer searches the same targeted term, they will be shown an ad from the NCA campaign.
The above method makes sense if you want to make a clean break and start with campaigns exclusively focused on new customer acquisition. If your preference is to keep more of your traffic in its current campaign(s), there is an alternative method that you can use:
- Copy the campaign
- Set your new campaign to only target past converters (Target+Bid RLSA / Customer Match)
- Exclude past converters audiences from your current campaign and that becomes the NCA campaign
New customer acquisition can be a crucial factor for businesses when evaluating the success of marketing efforts. Using RLSA and Customer Match audiences, businesses can easily track new customer performance data and use those insights to drive even stronger results.
