How RMS Beauty Cut Its Cost per New Customer by 83% in Google Ads
Introduction
RMS Beauty is a clean beauty brand founded by makeup artist Rose-Marie Swift. Like any growing brand, it wanted to acquire more new customers through Google Ads at a reasonable cost. The problem was that spending more tended to reach people who had already bought before, so the cost of acquiring each new customer kept climbing.
RMS solved this by switching its campaigns to optimize on Littledata's New Customer Purchase event, sent by Littledata's Google Ads connection, which cut the cost per new customer by 83% during Q4 2025.
Challenge
Ahead of Q4 2025, RMS wanted to bring in as many new customers as possible and nurture them into repeat buyers over time. Google Ads has a New Customer Acquisition goal built for exactly this, but it can only bid for new customers as accurately as the data it's given to tell them apart from returning ones, and RMS didn't have that data in place:
- Google's autodetection alone couldn't reliably separate first-time buyers from existing ones.
- Customer Match lists, the usual way to supplement it, needed constant manual updating and didn't scale.
- Excluding existing buyers with static match lists pushed the cost per acquisition up.
Key Wins
-83%
cost per new customer
+480%
value per cost vs. Q4 2024
2% → 7%
campaign conversion rate
Solution
RMS installed Littledata, which started sending a New Customer Purchase event to Google Ads automatically once it was connected. From that point, RMS could see:
- Every purchase split into new and returning customers, with the conversion value for each, directly in Google Ads reports.
- New customers identified on the server, using data sent straight from Shopify rather than browser cookies.
- Confirmation of whether a buyer was genuinely new, by cross-referencing customer IDs and hashed customer data.
Google recommends supplementing its autodetection with first-party data for the most accurate new-customer detection. Littledata is the simplest way to supply it: a clean, server-side purchase signal the New Customer Acquisition goal can bid on with confidence.
Results
In October 2025, RMS took one of its highest-budget Performance Max campaigns and changed its main optimization signal from all purchases to the New Customer Purchase event. It then ran through the Q4 holiday period.
- Cost per new customer fell 83%, to $8.79. Over the same period, the account-wide cost per acquisition, which counts both new and returning customers, rose to $12.39. In other words, this campaign brought in new customers for less than the account paid per order on average.
- Value per cost rose 480% compared with Q4 2024, close to a five-fold increase. The campaign's conversion rate went from 2% to over 7%.
- The campaign's average cost per click was $1.23, while account-wide CPC rose to $1.46 over the same window.
The Takeaway
By giving Google Ads first-party data identifying new buyers, RMS prevented its Performance Max campaign from defaulting to repeat buyers and brand searchers and instead directed the budget toward new customers. It acquired them for 83% less during the busiest shopping period of the year.
Bonus: If you already use Littledata's Google Analytics connection, you can enable Google Ads for no additional cost in just a few easy steps right inside the Littledata app.
