• by Laurie Sullivan , 6 hours ago

Google is testing the ability to automatically assign a “New Customer Value” in “New Customer Acquisition (NCA)” campaigns — without the advertisers’ consent amid pushback from agencies supporting brands.

It's not clear whether the issues are a result of agency representatives misunderstanding how the process works, or whether they do not believe Google has fully thought through this process.

“This guidance is part of an experiment aimed at helping advertisers use settings that will improve results — specifically, to increase new customer ratios,” Google Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin wrote in a response to a blog post in LinkedIn.

Marvin explained that when advertisers set the campaign value too low, or do not set it at all, it prevents proper optimization to find high-value new customers. Marketers should always put the setting in the default value in the user interface based on historical data when they are not sure, or test the recommended equation —  2x the average order value.

Some marketers reacted by expressing problems with the change. Bilal Yasin, senior performance marketer at Lazzaweb, a digital marketing agency based in Denmark, detailed some of their grievances in a post that got Marvin’s attention.

“Without any heads-up, and without it being in the change history, a new customer value has suddenly been applied to a customer,” Yasin wrote in a LinkedIn post. “It was set to 200 DKK. One thing is that Google has assigned a value, but another is that I can't remove it again!”

Yasin questioned how Google could possibly know that the value of his new customers or that the revenue is artificially too high, with most of the conversions coming in still listed as unknown. These were some of the major issues that Kim Petersen, CEO at performance affiliate network Geniads, wrote about last month.

Petersen, also in a LinkedIn post, became frustrated after discovering that one of his client's account bids for new customers — set at DKK 0.01 — was rejected, and said "Google now requires me to set a minimum incremental value of DKK 14.12.”

The low value is used to track trends and see the ratio of new versus returning customers. However, Google rejected this bid and required a much higher minimum incremental value.

Petersen -- who had asked Marvin about the change at the time with no public response -- argued that Google is pushing advertisers to adopt inflated values just to access the same insights that advertisers had access to “freely.”

When Marvin responded on Monday to Yasin's post, she wrote about understanding the concerns. 

"If you’re setting low values for NCA reporting purposes, you can simply turn NCA on/off to unlock reporting," Marvin wrote. "We will be introducing new customer reporting for all purchase conversion campaigns in the next couple of quarters."