THE D2C DILEMMA
Every D2C brand wants new customers. Few actually optimize for them.
If you’ve spent even a week in the D2C health and wellness space, you’ve heard this story before:
“We need to grow our customer base, not just sell more to existing buyers!”
“But when you look under the hood of most Google Ads accounts, the algorithm is optimizing for easy repeat purchases, not new customer growth.”
And that’s exactly what was happening to Barton Nutrition.
About Barton Nutrition
Barton Nutrition is a direct-to-consumer health and wellness supplement brand running campaigns across Google Ads for products including CinnaChroma, Berberine, Nervala, and HealthyHeart. With a multi-product portfolio and a large existing customer base, Barton Nutrition came to CustomerLabs with a precise, numbers-driven challenge, one most agencies hadn’t even thought to ask.
The Google’s algorithm was working against new customer growth
Barton Nutrition’s Google Ads campaigns were delivering purchases. On paper, performance looked reasonable. But a deeper look told a different story.
The core problem had three symptoms:
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Google Ads was using all purchases including existing customers as its primary conversion signal.
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The algorithm naturally gravitated toward cheaper, easier repeat purchases, because those were easier wins.
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The result: inflated purchase volume, high nCAC, stagnant new customer rate, and a ROAS that didn’t reflect true business growth.
The algorithm wasn’t broken. It was doing exactly what it was told. The problem was: it was being told the wrong thing.
Barton Nutrition needed to teach Google Ads a new definition of success one that counted only first-time buyers as a genuine win.
And the solution
Signal Engineering: Teaching Google what ‘new customer’ really means
What Is Signal Engineering?
Signal Engineering is the process of choosing and sending the most valuable customer actions, first-party data to ad platforms, teaching their algorithms what success looks like for your specific business.
Most brands send a generic ‘purchase’ event. Barton Nutrition, with CustomerLabs, sent something far more precise: a new customer purchase event, a conversion signal that fires only when a verified first-time buyer completes a transaction.
The Three-Step Implementation for Barton Supplements
1. Build the Event
CustomerLabs engineered a custom conversion event cl_new_customer_purchase, that fires exclusively on new customer purchases, using first-party data signals to filter out repeat buyers with precision.
2. 30-Day Warm-Up Period
Before going live, the event ran passively for 30 days. This gave Google’s algorithm enough conversion history to learn from, ensuring the switch would be smooth and the algorithm wouldn’t go into a learning spiral.
3. Flip the Switch
On February 1, 2026, the new cl_new_customer_purchase event was set as the primary conversion goal across all active Google Ads campaigns, PMAX and Search. The change itself took 5 minutes. The results took 55 days to confirm.
The volume decrease in total purchases was expected and intentional. Google previously padded conversion counts with low-cost repeat buyers. By excluding them, the algorithm re-optimized toward genuine new customer acquisition.
Before vs. After: A clean 54-day apples-to-apples comparison.
Comparing the 54-day period before implementation (Dec 9, 2025 – Jan 31, 2026) to the 55-day period after (Feb 1 – Mar 26, 2026):
Account-Level Performance: Full Breakdown
| Metric | Before (Dec 9 – Jan 31) | After (Feb 1 – Mar 26) | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total Spend | $23,239 | $16,037 | Budget pullback |
| Purchases | 185 | 153 | ▼ 17.3% |
| New Customer Purchases | 88 | 75 | ▼ 14.8% |
| New Customer Rate | 47.6% | 49.0% | ▲ +1.5 pts |
| nCAC (New Customer Acq. Cost) | $264.08 | $213.83 | ▼ 19.0% |
| ROAS | 1.12 | 1.40 | ▲ 25.0% |
| NC ROAS | 0.52 | 0.65 | ▲ 25.0% |
| Conversion Rate | 3.62% | 4.74% | ▲ 31.0% |
| Key Insight The volume decrease in total purchases is expected and intentional. Google’s algorithm previously padded conversion counts with low-cost repeat buyers. By excluding repeat purchases from the conversion signal, the algorithm re-optimized toward genuine new customer acquisition, driving a lower nCAC and higher ROAS despite fewer total conversions reported. |
|---|
The Right Signal Changes Everything
Most brands ask Google to optimize for purchases. They get purchases, lots of them, from people who’ve already bought before.
Barton Nutrition asked Google to optimize for something different: first-time buyers only. And by using CustomerLabs to build that signal with first-party data, not a platform default, not a Shopify tag, but a precisely engineered event, the algorithm had exactly what it needed to do its job correctly.
The 30-day warm-up was the difference-maker. Without it, flipping the primary conversion signal would have sent the campaigns into an extended learning phase. With it, the algorithm was ready to perform from day one.
“We didn’t change our campaigns. We didn’t change our creative. We changed what we told Google to optimize for and that changed everything.”
Your Google Ads algorithm is optimizing for something. Make sure it’s the right thing.
Either book a demo and talk to the expert about your business goals or just skip that part and get your hands dirty with a free start free trial
No new campaigns. No extra budget. Just a better signal.
