About customer value reporting

Starting on April 1, 2023, customer value features impacted by Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) and third-party cookie deprecation in Google Chrome, will be phased out.

The following features will be phased out:

• Customer value page
• Modeling for customer value
• Similar audiences related to high value audiences

A large percentage of your sales may be driven by a relatively small group of high-value customers. These customers visit your site more frequently and purchase many of your products or services over time.

You can access aggregated and anonymized information on the value of your customers based on data from the previous 12 months.

 This article explains how to use these insights on your returning customers to optimize your performance.

There are instances in which Google does not measure conversion data. These conversions will be excluded from the customer value page.

Benefits

• Assess value of customer loyalty: Compare the value of one-time customers vs. returning customers.
• Identify audiences: Use the aggregated and anonymized information (demographic, location, device-type, and affinity audience) of returning customers to identify the characteristics of potentially high-value audiences.

Before you begin

To use the customer value page to see information about the characteristics of your likely high-value, medium-value, and one-time customers, you’ll need to meet the following criteria:

• Set up a global site tag and capture website purchase conversions with a monetary value.
• Your campaign should be running for at least 15 months, as Google needs historical data to estimate purchase patterns.

Note: Some advertisers may not see customer value reporting as more conversion volume is required for this data analysis.

How it works

Follow these instructions in your account to access your customer value page:

• Open your Google Ads account.
• Click the tools & settings icon .
• Under “Measurement,” select Customer value.

Keep in mind that you won’t see the customer value page in your account until you set up conversions and meet the criteria outlined in the “Before you begin” section above.

The customer value page shows aggregated and anonymized information about your customers over the previous 12 months. Your customers are grouped into 3 segments.

1. High value customers: Top 25% of returning customers based on the total value of their purchase conversions
2. Medium value customers: Bottom 75% of returning customers based on the total value of their purchase conversions. 
3. One-time customers: Customers who have made only one purchase.

How customer value is determined

The dollar value separating medium-value and high-value customer segments is calculated once at the time of data generation.

If a returning customer (a user with more than one conversion) has spent less than the average for the top 25% of customers over a 12-month period, they will be classified as a medium-value customer. If they've spent more than the bottom 75%, they'll be classified as a high-value customer.

Where customer value data comes from

We aggregate customer value for observed online and purchase conversions that you've given a monetary value.

Offline conversions, API conversions, and conversion adjustments are not supported yet.

What you’ll see

Customer value over the previous 12 months

You’ll see a table with your conversion data in the first section.

• Average customer lifespan in weeks: This is the average number of weeks between the customers’ first and last observed conversions.
• Customer count: This is the number of customers in each segment.
• Observed conversions: This is the number of all observed purchases, whether or not they're directly attributed to an ad interaction.
• Average conversion value: This is the average value of a single conversion per customer.
• Average total conversion value: This is the average 12-month total conversion value per customer.

Distribution of your customer base over the previous 12 months

You can compare your high-value, medium-value, or one-time customers with all your customers. You can see data based on the demographics, locations, and devices of these customers.

• Demographics: You’ll see data distribution based on gender, age, parental status, and affinity audiences.
• Location: You’ll see data distribution based on geographic location. You can view this breakdown by countries, regions or cities.
• Device type: You’ll see distribution of your customers based on the device type used:
  • Mobile phones
  • Computers
  • Tablets

Segment by customer value

You can segment your data by high-value, medium-value, and one-time customers to compare them with the distribution of conversions across all your customers. Click the drop-down menu in the top corner of your chart to select a segment.

On the charts, the colored bar represents the customer value segment you’ve selected. The gray bar represents all customers. If the colored bar is higher than the gray bar, this may indicate that users in this segment are more likely to be high value customers.

 

The bars for your customer value data will add up to 100%. For example, your high value customers might be 65% females and 35% males. Your age and parental data will add up to 100% as well.

How time affects customer value

This chart compares the distribution of your customer spending across two time periods. The Value over 1 month column contains the distribution of value acquired from your high, medium and one-time customers within a period of 1 month. The Value over 12 months column contains the distribution of value acquired from these segments calculated over a period of 12 months.

This is helpful to understand how much your high value, medium value and one-time customers might contribute over time. A one-time customer and a high value customer may appear to be identical, if they both make a single purchase. However, the high value customer may continue purchasing items over time, accruing more value to your business.

Try comparing the percentage of value acquired by your high value users over 1 month and 12 months. Is the 12 month percentage higher? If the difference is significant, this might illustrate how much your high value users continue to contribute over time.