Fact-check
There's no single, officially named "New Customer Acquisition report broken down by channel." These are two separate, separately documented data sources that you have to cross-reference yourself, not one built-in cross-tab.
A quick primer
The first source is the new customer acquisition goal itself: it uses Customer Match lists and the Google Tag to identify likely new prospects and prioritize bids toward them, with two modes: New Customer Value (a balance between new and returning) and New Customer Only (focused solely on new customers). Reporting for this goal lives at the campaign level: you can add a acquisition cost column, plus a New vs. returning segment on the Campaigns table showing the count of new customers and their lifetime value. That's aggregate data at the campaign level, with no built-in channel breakdown.
The second source is the channel performance report itself, which supports segmenting the channel distribution table by conversion type, including Conversion action and Conversion category. Google's general list of available report segments confirms that Conversion action exists as its own segment, splitting each report row out by a specific configured conversion action. So if your account tracks a distinct conversion action for "new customer" (for example, through a parameter set up in your conversion tag), you could in principle isolate that action and segment the channel distribution table by it. But that takes manual setup on your end; it isn't a ready-made link between the two systems.
What to check before you touch anything
- Are Customer Match and the Google Tag set up correctly. Without them, neither the new customer acquisition goal nor its reporting will be accurate.
- Is the new customer acquisition parameter configured in your conversion tag. Without it, "new customer" won't exist as its own distinct conversion action that you could segment the channel report by.
- Are you looking at the campaign-level aggregate (new customer acquisition cost, New vs. returning customers) and expecting a ready-made channel breakdown in the same view. It doesn't exist there.
- Has enough time passed since turning on the new customer acquisition goal for a meaningful read. Campaigns need one to two weeks to adjust to a significant change like enabling this goal.
Possible approaches
- If you only need the aggregate new-customer contribution at the campaign level, use the new customer acquisition cost column and the "New vs. returning customers" segment directly, without trying to break it down by channel.
- If you need the channel breakdown specifically, set up the new customer acquisition parameter in your conversion tag so "new customer" becomes its own distinct conversion action, then segment the channel distribution table by that specific Conversion action.
- If that setup is impractical for your current analytics stack, cross-reference the two sources manually: watch the campaign-level new customer acquisition cost trend alongside the channel report's trend over time, looking for correlation rather than an exact match.
- Don't expect these two reports to reconcile perfectly out of the box. They're different measurement systems, best used to complement each other rather than as a single source of truth.