Google Ads · Status at source date: Newsletter archive
Google's "new prospects" mode appears in live accounts for true cold-audience targeting
The new prospects bidding mode announced at GML is now surfacing in real accounts, and practitioners are testing how strict it actually is. Maggie Humphrey and Arpan Banerjee both dug into the setting this week.
What changed
Google uses automated exclusions to filter out past purchasers, users who have searched your brand terms, visited your site, used your app, or engaged with your content across Google and YouTube: leaving only genuinely brand-unaware audiences.
The mode is available across Search, Shopping, Performance Max, and Demand Gen. Google states it stops ads from serving to existing customers entirely: a stronger claim than the current "only bid for new customers" setting, where returning buyers often still slip through without manual exclusion lists. Google's own data show a 9% improvement in ROAS for advertisers valuing new customers at 2x the average order value, and an 11.5% improvement in the new-customer ratio, with a 3% lower acquisition cost, under New Customers Only mode.
Why it matters for advertisers
For you, this means brand-growth advertisers can now configure cold-audience targeting through a standard bidding mode rather than complex audience exclusions. Worth piloting on a defined awareness budget and verifying the exclusion behaviour against your own customer lists before scaling.
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Google's "new prospects" mode appears in live accounts for true cold-audience targeting
The new prospects bidding mode announced at GML is now surfacing in real accounts, and practitioners are testing how strict it actually is. Maggie Humphrey and Arpan Banerjee both dug into the setting this week. Google uses automated exclusions to filter out past purchasers, users who have searched your brand terms, visited your site, used your app, or engaged with your content across Google and YouTube: leaving only genuinely brand-unaware audiences.
The mode is available across Search, Shopping, Performance Max, and Demand Gen. Google states it stops ads from serving to existing customers entirely: a stronger claim than the current "only bid for new customers" setting, where returning buyers often still slip through without manual exclusion lists. Google's own data show a 9% improvement in ROAS for advertisers valuing new customers at 2x the average order value, and an 11.5% improvement in the new-customer ratio, with a 3% lower acquisition cost, under New Customers Only mode.
For you, this means brand-growth advertisers can now configure cold-audience targeting through a standard bidding mode rather than complex audience exclusions. Worth piloting on a defined awareness budget and verifying the exclusion behaviour against your own customer lists before scaling.
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