Introduction

After this section, you will be able to see New Customer metrics such as New Customer ROAS (NC-ROAS), Cost per New Customer Purchase (CAC), etc. right in your Meta Ads Manager.

Why you should care about New Customer Events in your Meta Ads Manager

Even when you set up exclusions correctly, Meta usually does quite a lot of re-targeting on existing customers.

Most performance marketers want to focus their Meta spend (almost) exclusively on acquiring new customers.

Sending a NewCustomerPurchase event to Meta that excludes all existing customer conversions, allows you to:

  • Report in-platform on CAC: Brands often want to get a sense of how much they are paying for a new customer (CAC) and not (only) how much they are paying for a purchase.
  • Optimize towards New Customers: You can force the Meta ad targeting algorithm to only be rewarded for New Customer conversions when using this as an optimization event.

Step-by-step installation instructions

  1. Go to your Meta Events Manager and click on Custom Conversions > Create custom conversion.

  2. Fill in New Customer Purchase in the Name-field, and pick NewCustomerPurchase in the Event-field.  

    If you do not see the NewCustomerPurchase event, go to the Meta Events Manager overview and verify this NewCustomerPurchase event before continuing.

  3. In the Choose a standard event for optimization-field, choose Purchase.  

  4. In Rules, choose URL, doesn’t contain and fill in does_not_exist in the form field. Press “enter” after you fill in until you see your input become light grey. After that press Create.  

  5. Now the Custom Conversion is created, we need to share it with our Ad Account. Click on the dropdown on the right for the new conversion you just created. After, click Share.  

  6. Click Share with an Ad Account.  

  7. Mark all the ad accounts you want to use this new Custom Conversion in.  

  8. Click on Share Custom Conversion.  

  9. The custom conversion is now created, time to show it in your Meta Ads Manager. Navigate to Meta Ads Manager and click on Columns > Customize Columns.  

  10. Under Custom Conversions you will find your NewCustomerPurchase, choose Total and Cost to show total conversions and cost per New Customer Purchase.  

  11. To add NC-ROAS, we need to create a custom metric, and click on Create custom metric.  

  12. Call your custom metric NC-ROAS and for Formula choose: NewCustomerPurchase Conversion Value ÷ Amount spent. Click on Create metric. Be sure to mark Everyone with access to this Business if you want to share the metric.  

  13. Also include NC-ROAS in your Customize columns if you want it to show up there.  

  14. Done 🎉  

    Initially, it will seem like no New Customer Purchase data is showing up in the Ads Manager because Meta does not support attributing custom conversions from the past.