Early look: Google Ads customer value reporting and conversion value rules

At SMX West last month, Google offered early looks at the new customer value reporting and value rules in Google Ads. The company first teased these features in the Google Ads UI at Google Marketing Live last year. They’re both still in beta but here’s what we know about how they’re designed to work.

Customer value reporting. When it’s live in your accounts, you’ll find conversion value reporting located in the Tools dropdown under the Measurement section in the Google Ads UI.

Customer value reporting shows the “Distribution of your customer base over the previous 12 months” broken out by demographics (gender, age, parental status), locations and devices.

The bar charts in the example above show high-value customers compared to all users. In this case, the advertiser’s high-value customers over the past year skew female 35+-year-old parents. Note the data is sampled, you’ll see that below the chart to the right.

You can change the view to see medium-value and one-time customers from the dropdown in the upper right corner.

The demographics reporting is based on what signed-in users indicate in their Google accounts or what Google infers about users based on their search and browsing behaviors.

Conversion value rules. Google is also beta-testing conversion value rules. (It’s located in the Conversions section under Measurement options when enabled.) You can “adjust values for conversion events based on conditions like location or device.” At this point, the options are limited to location and device, but audience will be an option eventually.

The rules will then be applied to your bidding Google will also report on your conversion value rules. This will allow you to customize conversion values so they align more closely with your business goals.

Why we care. The customer value reporting and value rules are aimed at giving advertisers more insights and flexibility to optimize for high-value conversions. They follow from Google’s move to allow advertisers to set conversion events at the campaign rather than account level. Keep in mind that these are still in testing and are subject to change before (or if) they roll out generally.