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New-to-Brand Rate
New-to-Brand Rate is the share of attributed conversions that come from customers with no prior purchase history with the brand, typically within a defined lookback window. It isolates acquisition impact from repeat purchases inflating a campaign's apparent performance.
Formula
Worked example
A Dutch DTC skincare brand runs a 4-week prospecting campaign that drives 3,600 attributed purchases. Matching against the CRM's 12-month purchase history shows 900 of those buyers have no prior order. New-to-Brand Rate = 900 / 3,600 x 100 = 25%. A quarter of the campaign's credited sales represent actual customer growth; the other 75% are repeat buyers the brand likely would have retained regardless.
How it is used
Planners use it alongside blended ROAS to separate growth spend from retention spend, since a channel with high ROAS but a low NTB rate may just be harvesting existing demand rather than expanding the customer base. The common failure is comparing NTB rates across platforms without checking each one's lookback window definition; Meta, Google, and a clean-room measurement setup rarely use the same window, so a 30-day window will report a lower rate than a 365-day window for the identical audience.
The common mistake
Normalize the lookback window before comparing New-to-Brand Rate across platforms, since a shorter window systematically understates the rate relative to a longer one.