No, and it usually does the opposite. If your bidder optimises a total purchase value, a target ROAS floor structurally rewards repeat-buyer traffic and penalises new-customer traffic — it is not neutral, it is directionally harmful.

On this page

• How does this actually work?
• Is there measured proof that a ROAS floor hurts new-customer share?
• How do I actually steer Google Ads toward new customers?
• Why does bid tuning fail to move new-customer cost?

How does this actually work?

When a campaign runs Maximize Conversion Value with a target ROAS, and the primary conversion action is a total purchase action, the bidder optimises total purchase value.

Which means:

• The floor only binds at or above the ad group's achieved total ROAS. A 2.5× floor on an ad group running 6× total ROAS is mechanically inert. Nothing happens.
• The floor does not respond to new-customer ROAS at all. You cannot target new customers by setting a target equal to a desired new-customer efficiency.

Repeat buyers convert at higher value on lower spend. So a total-value floor is easiest to satisfy by finding more of them.

Is there measured proof that a ROAS floor hurts new-customer share?

A supplements brand ran a natural A/B for 2.5 months. Same account, same conversion setup, same period. One Demand Gen campaign carried a 2.75 target ROAS floor from May 19. The other carried no floor.

Last 4 settled weeks:

The floor bought total-efficiency optics by cutting new-customer share of revenue by more than half, and produced zero new-customer improvement. $161 versus $162.

How do I actually steer Google Ads toward new customers?

First, turn on Google's new-customer acquisition setting so the value bidder weights new customers directly. Only after that does a floor steer toward the right people. Note it is interface-only on some API versions — confirmed unrecognised on v24, August 2026.

Then, if the campaign is budget-capped and you cannot add budget, throttle the repeat-harvesters by raising their floor to at or above their recent total ROAS, so it finally bites and they cede their share of the fixed budget. Leave the new-customer engines loose to absorb it. Verify first that your best new-customer engines also carry high total ROAS, or the freed budget just flows to other harvesters.

Why does bid tuning fail to move new-customer cost?

If every bid lever optimises a metric that does not contain new customers, no amount of bid tuning will move new-customer cost. That same supplements account ran ten weeks of ad pauses, budget cuts and target changes and moved new-customer CAC from $158 to $170. Nowhere.

Check what the bidder can actually see before you spend weeks tuning it. Only conversion actions that are both primary and included in the conversions metric are what it optimises.

Related questions

Does turning on "bid higher for new customers" inflate the ROAS I see in Google Ads?

Yes, if you set a new-customer value bonus. Google adds that bonus to reported conversion value, so your reported efficiency rises without any change in actual revenue. Read the full answer.

How do I work out what target ROAS to actually set for my store?

Derive it from contribution margin and your fixed per-order costs, not from a benchmark. The formula everyone uses — 1 ÷ gross margin — is a breakeven floor, not a target, and it ignores the per-order costs that decide whether an order is actually worth having. Read the full answer.

I added a target ROAS and the campaign stopped spending. Should I lower the target?

Whether to lower the target depends entirely on when the campaign stopped spending. A campaign that strangled within about 24 hours of the target being added and one that drifted into it over weeks look identical in the interface, and the fixes are opposite — lowering the target is the wrong move in one of them. Read the full answer.

Written by Usama Khan, who runs Google Ads for e-commerce brands and home-services companies at AdventurAds. Figures are from accounts under active management and are anonymised. Last reviewed 2026-08-26.