Google Ads' 'Report on New Customers Acquired': Measure New-Customer ROAS Without Touching Bids

Ask most Indian D2C founders what their real cost of acquiring a new customer is on Google Ads, and you'll get a shrug or a guess. Not because they don't care — because Google Ads made it oddly hard to see. For years, getting a clean new-versus-returning split meant reaching for the "Bid higher for new customers" goal and then defusing it with a token ₹0.01 value, so it would hand over the reporting columns without meaningfully moving your bids. It worked, but it was a hack, and every hack is a thing that can quietly break.

In August 2026 Google finally separated the two jobs. Around 7 August, it rolled out a "Report on new customers acquired" option that does exactly what the name says — it measures new-customer performance and touches nothing else. No bidding change, no distortion, no ₹0.01 sitting in your settings like a note you forgot to explain. This post covers what the new option does, how Google decides who's actually "new," how to switch it on, and how to read the numbers against the parts of Indian D2C — COD, RTO, festive first-timers — that Google's report doesn't know about.

What Google actually shipped

The change is small and precise, which is why it's easy to miss. Google added a "Report on new customers acquired" choice inside the Customer Acquisition settings. Search Engine Land summed up the point: advertisers can now "measure new customer performance without applying any bidding adjustments." Selecting it unlocks two columns — "New customers" and "New customer value" — giving you both the count of new buyers and the rupee value they brought in, at the campaign level.

It was spotted in the wild before Google made noise about it. The reporting workaround was "first highlighted by Vasant Chaudhary," and the new option itself was shared by paid-search expert Thomas Eccel on LinkedIn, per Search Engine Roundtable. In other words, this is a confirmed, live feature, not a rumour or a limited test you're reading about too early.

Why measurement-only matters

Here's the distinction that makes this useful. "Bid higher for new customers" is an optimisation lever — it tells Smart Bidding to pay more for first-time buyers, which changes your bids and can pull spend around. "Report on new customers acquired" is a measurement lever — it changes what you can see, not what the algorithm does. Those are different needs, and until now Google forced you to accept the first to get the second. Plenty of accounts don't want their bids nudged; they just want to know whether their spend is buying new customers or recycling old ones. This option finally answers that question without side effects.

How Google defines a "new customer"

A report is only as good as its definition, so this part matters. Google counts someone as a new customer if they haven't purchased within a chosen lookback window, and the recommended default is 540 days — roughly eighteen months. Buy inside that window and you're "returning"; your last purchase is older than it, or you've never bought, and you're "new." You can shorten or lengthen the window, but 540 days is the sensible starting point for most D2C stores.

The three ways to supply status

Google needs to know who's new, and there are three ways to tell it, in rough order of accuracy.

When status is genuinely uncertain — a guest checkout Google can't match to anyone — the parameter can be left unspecified rather than guessed. For most Indian D2C brands on Shopify, the app-based route is the path of least resistance; if you have a solid customer database and want the cleanest numbers, feed status through the conversion tag instead.

Why this lands well for Indian D2C

New-customer measurement isn't a nice-to-have here — it's tied to two things Indian brands genuinely struggle to see clearly: festive acquisition and geographic expansion.

Festive spend and the first-timer question

Festive traffic — Diwali, Big Billion Days, end-of-year sales — skews heavily toward first-time buyers hunting a deal. That's exactly when founders question whether the spend is worth it. With "New customers" and "New customer value" broken out in rupees, you can answer directly: did this festive push actually bring in net-new buyers, or did it mostly discount repeat customers who'd have returned anyway? That's a far stronger justification for a festive budget than a blended ROAS that hides the mix.

Tier-2 and Tier-3 growth is a new-customer story

India's D2C growth is increasingly coming from beyond the metros. Unicommerce's India D2C Report 2026 found that 66% of the next wave of D2C customers sit outside metro areas, in Tier II and Tier III cities. Opening those pockets is, by definition, a new-customer motion — and a measurement-only report is a low-risk way to confirm your Shopping and Performance Max campaigns are actually acquiring buyers there rather than re-selling to the same metro base. Reading that split correctly, and acting on it across Shopping, PMax and Search, is the kind of account work our growth marketing team runs for D2C brands week to week.

The one number to distrust: COD value

There's a catch Google's report can't account for, and it's a big one in India. The "New customer value" figure is the conversion value at the moment of purchase. On a prepaid order that's clean. On a COD order, it's a placed-order value — and COD orders cancel and get returned at rates that make placed-order value a poor proxy for money actually collected. Unicommerce's 2026 data shows just how heavy this is: COD returns ran at 58% of festive orders, and overall RTO sat at 39.2% in November 2025 before operational fixes pulled it down to around 21% by March 2026.

So a campaign can post a gorgeous "new customer value" that partly evaporates at the doorstep. The fix is discipline, not distrust: reconcile Google's new-customer value against your delivered or prepaid revenue before you turn it into a new-customer ROAS anyone makes decisions on. The report tells you who's new; your fulfilment data tells you who actually paid.

How to set it up this week

Turn it on and leave bidding alone

In each purchase-focused campaign, open Customer Acquisition settings and choose "Report on new customers acquired" rather than "Bid higher for new customers." If you've been running the old ₹0.01 hack, this is your cue to retire it — switch to the clean option so nobody inherits a mystery token value later.

Wire up new-customer status properly

Decide your source of truth. Shopify brands can lean on the Google & YouTube app; brands with strong first-party data should pass status through the conversion tag for accuracy. Confirm the 540-day lookback fits your category's real repurchase cycle — a consumable with a two-month cycle and a mattress bought once a decade are very different stories.

Build one honest new-customer view

Pull "New customers" and "New customer value" next to spend, then place your delivered-revenue reconciliation beside it. That single view — new buyers, their real value, and what they cost — is the number most D2C accounts have been missing, and it's now yours without gambling on your bids.

The takeaway

This is a quiet, welcome fix. Since around 7 August 2026, Google Ads lets you measure new-customer volume and value through "Report on new customers acquired" with zero impact on Smart Bidding — no more abusing the "Bid higher for new customers" goal with a token value to see the split. Switch it on, define "new" with a lookback that matches your category, and feed status cleanly through Shopify or your conversion tag. Then read it like an Indian operator: treat COD "new customer value" as a placed-order figure and reconcile it against what you actually delivered. Do that, and you'll finally answer the question your ad spend has been dodging — are we buying new customers, or just paying to keep the old ones?

Sources: Search Engine Land — "Google Ads adds dedicated reporting for new customer acquisition" (7 Aug 2026; measurement without bidding adjustments; "New customers" and "New customer value" columns; prior 0.01 token-value workaround). Search Engine Roundtable — "Google Ads Report On New Customers Acquired" (feature spotted by Vasant Chaudhary, shared by Thomas Eccel; measurement-only, no bidding-algo impact). Google Ads Help — Customer Acquisition documentation (new-customer definition; 540-day recommended lookback; conversion-tag, auto-detection and Shopify methods). Unicommerce India D2C Report 2026 (66% of next-wave customers in Tier II/III cities; RTO 39.2% Nov 2025 → ~21% Mar 2026; 58% festive COD returns).