New vs Returning customers
A new customer is someone making their first purchase from you; a returning customer has bought before. Telling the two apart lets you see what acquiring a brand-new buyer actually costs and returns, instead of hiding it inside one blended number.
Blended revenue hides your most important question: are your ads bringing in new customers, or just collecting repeat purchases you would have gotten anyway? TrueMetriks separates the two everywhere it matters, in the dashboard and out in your ad platforms.
Video guide
See it on the Revenue page
The Revenue page has an Audience dropdown with three options: New + Returning, New, and Returning.
Switching it re-scopes every number on the page to the audience you pick: total revenue, purchases, AOV, ROAS, and profit, plus every row in the source, campaign, and content breakdowns. Set it to New to see what a first-time buyer really costs you and what they are worth on that first order; set it to Returning to see the repeat-purchase business your existing customers drive. This is the fastest way to judge whether a campaign is genuinely acquiring customers or just harvesting repeats.
Send it to your ad platform
The dashboard view above is for you. To make your ad platform optimize toward new customers, the platform itself has to know which purchases were new, and you do that by firing a separate conversion event for them.
Open Settings, then Tracking, pick your ad platform, and find Custom events. Click Create, map the standard Purchase event to a custom name, then set Fire when to New customers only (or Returning only).
Create custom event
Purchase to a custom name and set Fire when to New customers only (or Returning only), so the custom event fires only for first-time buyers.Now that custom event fires only when the buyer is a first-time customer. Your normal Purchase keeps firing for everyone, so nothing you already rely on changes; you are simply adding a clean, new-customer-only signal alongside it.
Use it as a column in your ads
Saving the mapping auto-creates the custom event as a Custom Conversion on your pixel in Facebook (Events Manager, then Custom conversions). It starts inactive until the first matching purchase lands, then goes active. The full Facebook setup, including creating the catalog and finding the conversion, is on the Facebook integration page.
From there, add it as a column in Ads Manager: open the Columns menu, choose Customize columns, search the custom name, tick Total, Value, and Cost, and Apply.
Now each campaign shows its new-customer purchases and their value right next to spend. Prospecting campaigns that win first-time buyers stop being buried inside blended totals, and you can optimize budget toward the campaigns that actually grow your customer base, not just the ones that re-bill people who would have come back anyway.
How a customer is counted as new
On each purchase, TrueMetriks looks up whether that same person has bought from you before. It matches a person by the user ID your site sends when it identifies them, falling back to their email, and then to their persistent device identity, so a repeat buyer is recognized across sessions and devices. The first purchase it can attribute to a person is counted as new; everything after is returning. New-customer status is scoped to your workspace, so a first purchase from your store counts as new for you regardless of anything that happened on another business's site.
Import your existing customers first
Because this is judged from our own record of who has purchased, it only knows about buyers TrueMetriks has actually seen. If you already had customers before installing TrueMetriks, or customers who bought through a channel it does not track, their next order would be counted as new, because as far as our records show it is their first.
Video guide
Seed that history so it does not happen. Go to Users, open the Imported customers tab, and click Upload CSV. The file needs at least an email column; first_name, last_name, phone, country, and first_purchase_date are optional, and any other columns are ignored. Everyone on that list is treated as an existing customer from then on, so their first purchase after the import counts as returning, not new.
No imported customers yet
Import your existing customer list to detect new vs returning buyers. Used by Facebook, Google Ads, GA4, and TikTok custom conversions. Upload a CSV with at least an email column (other fields like first_name, last_name, phone, country, first_purchase_date are optional). Any other columns will be ignored.
This is what keeps your new-customer numbers honest, both in the dashboard and in the new-customer conversions you send out to Facebook, Google Ads, GA4, and TikTok. Import your customer list once, up front, before you start trusting the new vs returning split.
Frequently asked questions
How does TrueMetriks decide a buyer is new?
On each purchase it looks up whether that person has bought from you before, matching by your user ID, then email, then persistent device identity. The first purchase it can attribute to a person counts as new; everything after is returning.
What about customers I had before installing TrueMetriks?
Import them first so they are not counted as new. Go to Users, open Imported customers, and upload a CSV with at least an email column. Everyone on that list is treated as an existing customer from then on.
How do I make my ad platform optimize toward new customers?
In Settings then Tracking, open Custom events and click Create, map the standard Purchase event to a custom name, and set Fire when to New customers only. That custom event fires only for first-time buyers while your normal Purchase keeps firing for everyone.