Off target: How overspending on repeat customers can limit growth

TOGETHER WITH

The new era of search. As shoppers turn to AI for search, retailers need a new approach to customer acquisition. Lebesgue helps retailers understand where their marketing efforts are most successful, from AI search to traditional paid ads. Get a clear picture of your entire strategy.

It costs money to attract (and retain) new customers. And in a market where ad spend can make or break your paid ads, you can’t risk targeting the wrong audience.

The unfortunate truth? Brands are often overcrediting paid channels for “new customer” growth when some of that spend is actually reacquiring existing demand. Repeat customers often get mistaken for new ones in a pattern called paid reacquisition, wasting precious ad dollars and stalling your business’s growth.

The key to accurately targeting new customers is understanding who your current and potential customers are. That’s where Lebesgue comes in. Lebesgue helps retailers understand where their marketing efforts are most successful, from AI search to traditional paid ads.

We teamed up with Lebesgue to learn about understanding your customer data, how AI traffic is changing brand discovery, and how growing brands can avoid the paid reacquisition trap. Here’s what you need to know.

Unblur the lines

As the path to purchase becomes less linear, it’s getting harder to understand inside ad platforms alone. Before you can refine your targeting, it’s important to know how paid reacquisition starts. Ad platforms like Meta and Google can blur lines by mistakenly labeling returning customers as new shoppers. This makes performance look stronger than it is, creating a misleading CAC.

When retailers are misinformed about their paid ad data, it can lead to the wrong budget decisions. Brands overestimate and scale the wrong channels (like paid ads and repeat customers) while ignoring the new ones with potential.

Here’s an example. Imagine a brand spends $100k on paid ads and reports acquiring 1k “new” customers, resulting in a $100 CAC. If 40% of those customers were actually returning buyers (who would have purchased anyway), the true CAC is closer to $167.

On paper, performance looks strong. But in reality, the brand is scaling spend on customers it already had. This is where platforms can blur the lines. When returning customers are misclassified as new, brands overestimate performance, underestimate true acquisition costs, and double down on the wrong channels.

AI platforms are changing the way customers discover and interact with brands. Put simply, retailers shouldn’t underestimate the impact of high-intent traffic in AI channels. Here’s why.

The AI effect

In the age of niche, high-context queries, AI is the interface helping shoppers discover brands—and the retailers that don’t have a strategy to capture its high-intent traffic are getting left behind.

For years, performance marketing has been built on the assumption that higher intent leads to better conversion and search wins. Now, data from Shopify brands tracked through Lebesgue suggests that traffic from AI tools converts better than that from Google Search.

Here’s a peek at Lebesgue’s reported numbers:

• AI-referred traffic has grown 35x year over year.
• Revenue per AI search session is approximately 30% higher.

There’s a reason why folks turn to their fave AI tool before heading to their classic browser search: Traditional search requires effort, research, and trial and error before they find the result they’re looking for. AI skips all that, providing recommendations and curated answers to hyperspecific questions, often with direct product links. And by the time customers click through their results, the buying decision is partially made.

Lebesgue’s solutions help retailers tap into the world of possibility created by AI with tools that increase first-party visibility and dive into incremental growth.

Mix up your marketing mix

Lebesgue helps brands understand what’s actually driving growth and what’s just capturing existing demand. By combining marketing, customer, and revenue data, it gives retailers a clearer and more complete view of performance across the full customer journey.

Instead of relying only on platform-reported numbers that can overcredit certain channels, Lebesgue helps brands validate what is truly incremental, identify where attribution may be overstating results, and better understand how each touchpoint contributes to revenue.

This makes it easier to distinguish between channels that are genuinely acquiring new customers and those that are primarily reengaging existing ones. With that clarity, retailers can shift budgets more confidently, invest in the channels that create real growth, and reduce wasted spend on performance that only appears strong on paper.

The result? More efficient marketing, clearer decision-making, and a stronger foundation for sustainable, long-term growth.

Focus up

Making the most of your ad spend starts with understanding which platforms are actually targeting and converting new customers. Luckily, you don’t have to comb through each channel and campaign manually. Learn how Lebesgue can help you explore your brand’s performance across AI traffic, paid channels, and more.