First-time Customers

First-time Customers shows how many customers placed their first order in your store in each period. It’s the pace at which you win new customers.

The First-time Customers report, with its summary card, chart and table

How It’s Calculated

The card at the top shows New customers for the date range. With a comparison on, it also shows the change from the comparison period. The chart draws First-time Customers for each period, and the table has one row per period with one column, New Customers.

A customer is new in a period when their first order in your store was placed in that period. The report finds each customer’s first order across your whole history, not only the date range. A customer counts once, in the period of that first order.

The length of the date range sets how long a period is:

3 days or less: one row per hour
Up to 93 days: one row per day
Longer: one row per month

The period changes the answer. A customer whose first order is on March 3 counts in the March 3 row of a daily report. In a monthly report, they count in March.

What Counts

Only customers with an order count. An order with no customer attached isn’t counted.
Orders that were canceled, or whose payment was voided or expired, don’t count, and they can’t be a customer’s first order.
A customer’s first order is found among orders in the Sales Channel you chose. With a channel chosen, it’s their first order in that channel.
A customer’s first order is found among all their orders in the channel, whatever Segment or Filters you set. A customer counts as new in the period of that first order, if the period has an order that matches. If their first order doesn’t match, they count as returning on a later matching order in Returning Customer Rate.
Days follow your store’s time zone.

What Good Looks Like

Healthy acquisition grows compared with the same period a year ago. Set Compare to 1 year ago to see that, so the same season is compared with the same season.

New customers only matter if they come back. Read this report next to Returning Customer Rate.

What to Do About It

New customers falling: check your ad spend and traffic on Advertising, and Sales by Channel for a channel that dropped.
A spike after a sale or a launch: check Cohort Retention to see whether that month’s customers came back.
Many new customers who don’t return: work on the second order with Cohort Repurchase Rate.

Where to Find It

First-time Customers: open Reports and look under Customers.
Returning Customer Rate: the share of customers each period who had ordered before.
First-time vs Returning Sales: the sales from first-time and returning customers.