New customers Google can't take credit for by accident.

Bones Coffee's Q4 goal was to bring as many new customers as possible to the site at a 1x ROAS, with Google campaigns that clearly generated those customers without help or influence from other platforms.

New customer reporting on Google is messy, because Shopping and Search capture branded searches from people who already found the brand somewhere else. The previous Performance Max setup mostly captured brand and returning-customer traffic. That set a strong baseline, but it hid how much true acquisition was happening. Performance Max also can't run Shopping alone by default, and it doesn't show which audiences convert.

• One source of truth. Triple Whale, connected to Shopify customer data, became the north star for new customer reporting.
• A new-customer machine. Performance Max was rebuilt as Shopping only, set to bid for new customers only, with brand exclusions and a branded negative keyword list added with Google's support team, so no branded traffic got through.
• Sharper signals. Existing customers were segmented by category (Decaf, Whole Bean, Ground, Single Serve) so the algorithm could learn each audience, with max conversion value bidding through the promotion season.
• Brand, kept separate. A brand-only Shopping campaign with automated negative keywords captured branded traffic on its own.
• Demand creation on YouTube. A video viewers campaign reached cold audiences, excluding 365 days of site visitors, every Klaviyo customer, and 540 days of purchasers.
• Retargeting on the big screen. More retargeting moved to Connected TV through MNTN.

The feed-only Performance Max campaigns sent 111K new visitors, who became 7,356 new customers at a 6.62% conversion rate and a 1.03 ROAS. That was twice as efficient as social's new customer efforts, and those campaigns alone produced 10% of all the new customers Bones gained in Q4.

The YouTube video viewers campaign sent 8,839 new visitors, who became 817 new customers at a 1.16 ROAS. Across the department, Google spend grew 48% year over year at a 6.31 ROAS, with profit up 4.4%.