Advertising that drives efficient purchases is great, but you know what’s all the rage with smart brands looking to maximize impact of their marketing budgets in 2025?

New-customer acquisition.

A few months ago, we took over Meta campaign management for an electronics brand selling on multiple sites, looking to drive sales from its owned media – and increase the percentage of new customers coming from those campaigns. This goal fit perfectly with DMi’s determination to put clients in optimal position for long-term growth, since too much budget going to customers already familiar with a brand – while likely resulting in relatively low acquisition costs – will have less incremental impact than bringing new users into the purchase journey.

With the Q4 surge in buying intent and attendant budget increases, we rolled up and got to work with a two-step process:

• Establish a baseline proportion of new vs. existing customers

• Improve that proportion using strategic exclusions available in Meta campaigns

In step one, we dug into the data available in analytics partner Northbeam and found that fewer than half of the purchases (around 30% at the beginning of October 2024) driven by Meta campaigns were coming from new customers.

In step two, we fed first-party CRM audiences and audiences coming from the retargeting pixel into the client’s Meta account settings to create an existing customer list. For our prospecting campaigns, we then entered a 0% value into Meta’s Advantage Shopping Campaign+ feature to instruct the platform not to serve ads to any user who:

• Has bought a product from the brand in the last 3-5 years, or

• Has visited the brand’s site in the past 90 days.

While these exclusions were aggressive, we formed our strategy knowing that Meta’s huge user base would give us plenty of scale to use to find new users.

Even with Q4’s usual increase in engagement costs, the strategy worked: from October through December, our new-customer acquisition cost lowered by 54%, which lowered our overall CAC by 49% – and our proportion of new customers climbed over 50% by mid-January. These results give us confidence that we’ll increase that number further by pushing that strategy through the rest of 2025.