Podcast 19: Working with Recency Segments in Google Analytics

Learn how to create recency segments in Google Analytics and how to use this data for predicting marketing campaign success and calculating lifetime value.   EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Want the transcribe from this episode? Click here to download it as a handy PDF. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher Do you know what your customer lifetime value is? Many startups are too new to have access to reliable information on this metric, but a great predictor is recency. Follow along in this episode as Drew walks through setting up a recency segment in Google Analytics which you can use to isolate your "best" customers to better understand where they came from and how you can acquire more of them. Highlights 00:00 – Introduction to recency and the lifetime value metric 00:54 – Drew's headbands 01:22 – How to create a "high recency" segment in Google Analytics 03:21 – Ignore the "Days Since Last Session" metric 04:08 – How to read the graph after you've created the segment 05:06 – Viewing aggregate behavior from your high recency users 06:54 – Using this segment to predict which marketing campaigns, ads, content pieces, etc. will work 07:36 – Breaking the data down by channels 09:02 – Breaking the data down by marketing campaigns 10:10 – Breaking the data down by individual Ads 11:22 – Recency for content businesses 12:58 – Wrapping things up Links / Resources To learn more about data-driven strategies that grow ecommerce businesses, just sign up for my mailing list. For an intro to recency and some context checkout episode 18: An Introduction to Recency – A Key Predictive Metric Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also download it for later. → Read the Transcript Everybody, welcome to the Nerd Marketing screen cast, podcast. Today we are going to dig into recency. I'm gonna show you some really cool, easy ways to assess recency in your Google Analytics account. Why would you wanna do this? Because who knows what customer lifetime value is? Right, raise your hand, who knows what their customer LTV is? I'm betting that not a lot of you are raising your hands right now. And that's because a lot of you guys are start-ups, and start-ups have no idea what a customer lifetime is. So how can you measure the lifetime value? For those of you who don't know your customer lifetime value, which is a critical metric to know. You're gonna use recency instead because recency predicts lifetime value. I should pause right now and talk about the setup here, these are my Nerd Marketing screen cast headbands and wristbands. I don't know if it looks better. Does it look better up? Like this? Or down? I'm gonna keep it up. Alright, so now we're gonna go into Google Analytics here. Fortunately, you don't have to stare at my face through this whole screen cast. Want to download this episode's transcribe? CLICK HERE to download as a PDF. But here's an eCommerce company I worked with and we're gonna talk about creating a high recency segment. So this is a segment of your users who are, who are more recent than the total group of your users. So these people have been on your site more recently. And we're just gonna see how you can use that segment to help you predict which marketing campaigns are really growing your business. And ultimately, answer that question of where do you wanna put your next marginal marketing dollar. And where you wanna put your effort. So what am I talking about here? Let me just walk you through this, this is looking at a three month timeframe in Google Analytics of all my traffic, all my activity on the site over the, these past three months. That's the blue line. The orange line will be my high recency segment. And to create this segment, you want to, I'll show you here. Click this plus, if you don't have this here but basically edit the segment.