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If Google Ads tells you 90% of your conversions are from new customers—you’re probably being misled.
In this episode, Eric sits down with Pilothouse’s Dougie, who exposes one of the biggest attribution errors in digital marketing: Google’s cookie‑based misreporting that makes you believe you’re crushing new customer acquisition when you're actually…not.
This episode is a must‑listen if you're spending on Google Ads and think you're scaling. You may just be paying full price to reacquire your own customers.
What we expose in this episode:
Why Google thinks nearly everyone is a new customer—and why that’s false
How cookie-based tracking is sabotaging your incrementality
Why server‑side tracking (via Elevar) is the fix—and how to set it up
The real cost of bad data: wasted CAC, poor ROAS, and misaligned goals
How to audit your own account to uncover the truth
If you're not feeding the right data to Google, you're training the algorithm to do the wrong thing. This is the fix—revealed.
Timestamps:
00:00 – Why Google's new customer data is misleading
02:00 – The impact of server-side tracking on attribution
04:00 – How Google misidentifies returning customers as new
06:00 – Training the Google Ads algorithm with quality data
08:00 – Using Elevar for accurate net new conversion tracking
10:00 – Aligning campaign goals with business outcomes
12:00 – Auditing new vs returning customer data
14:00 – LTV, cookie policies, and the future of tracking
16:00 – Why server-side tracking improves data fidelity
18:00 – The rise of AI summaries and their SEO impact
20:00 – Optimizing for ChatGPT and the future of AI search
Hashtags:
#GoogleAds #CustomerAcquisition #ConversionTracking #ServerSideTracking #Elevar #DigitalMarketing #DTCMarketing #PerformanceMarketing #AIsearch #EcommerceGrowth
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