Google Ads has quietly added a proper way to report on new customers without touching your bidding. Small update. Worth more attention than it'll get.
For a while now, advertisers who wanted to see new-versus-existing customer performance had one real option: go into Customer Acquisition, select "bid higher for new customers," and set the value to 0.01. A single penny, chosen specifically because it was too small to meaningfully move the bidding algorithm, but large enough to switch the reporting columns on. Everybody who needed the data used it. Nobody loved it.
That workaround is now retired. There's a third setting sitting alongside the old ones: report on new customers acquired, full stop, no bidding impact at all. You get the New customers and New customer value columns. Bidding stays exactly where you left it.
Why a whole industry was hacking a settings menu
Think about what that penny-bid trick actually says. Thousands of accounts, run by people who know the platform properly, deliberately gaming a setting to get data the interface didn't otherwise offer. That's not a fringe workaround — that's a signal. When enough experienced advertisers independently arrive at the same hack, the product is telling on itself: the reporting people actually needed didn't exist yet.
It's a useful reminder generally. Half of "best practice" in this industry is workarounds like that — clever, slightly grubby fixes for gaps in what the platform gives you by default. The fact this one got formalised doesn't mean it was ever officially sanctioned. It means enough people did it long enough, visibly enough, that Google noticed.
Why the separation matters more than the reporting
The real story isn't the new columns. It's what got decoupled: measurement and optimisation used to be bolted together, and now they don't have to be.
That distinction matters a lot to how I run an account. I want visibility into new-customer performance constantly — it's one of the clearest signals of whether an account is actually growing the business or just harvesting people who'd have bought anyway. But I very often don't want the bidding algorithm chasing new customers specifically, because "new customer" and "valuable customer" are not the same thing, and an algorithm told to prioritise the former will find you the cheapest, thinnest version of it.
Before this update, you couldn't fully separate those two decisions. Now you can watch the number without the number watching you back.
What to actually do with it
If you're managing your own account:
- Switch it on regardless of whether you plan to use new-customer bidding. The reporting alone is worth having — it's one of the fastest ways to spot an account that's quietly become a brand-retention machine dressed up as growth.
- Don't assume "new customer" means "good customer." Cross-reference against order value or lead quality before you let anyone — human or algorithm — chase this number on its own.
- If you were running the penny-bid workaround, switch it off. It was doing something, even if barely. There's no reason to leave a stray 0.01 bid modifier sitting in an account when the honest version of the setting now exists.
The point
Small platform update, but it fits the pattern I bang on about constantly: the metric you can see and the outcome you actually want are two different things, and the moment a tool lets you check one without accidentally steering the other, take it. Most account damage doesn't come from bad automation. It comes from measurement and optimisation getting tangled together until nobody can tell which one's driving.
Russell Anson runs Compulsion, an independent paid-search consultancy. Eighteen years in, pointed at the only metric that matters. compulsion.agency