Remarketing campaigns continue to be an effective tool to drive conversions at low CPAs. The more you dive into the rabbit hole of remarketing, the opportunities of segmentation seem endless. One area that is a good starting point for experimenting with remarketing segments is creating remarketing lists by membership duration – a.k.a how long to follow visitors.
What is Membership Duration?
Membership duration is the amount of time a visitor’s cookie stays on your remarketing list and how long you are able to show ads to these visitors. The membership duration should be similar to your average buying or conversion cycle.
Google provides the following example of how membership duration works “If you sell movie tickets, you might select a membership duration of a few days only, but if you sell cars, you might choose a duration of a few months. You’d do this because while it might not take too much time for people to decide they want to buy movie tickets, it generally takes longer to make the decision to buy a car. Similarly, if you sell Valentine’s Day gifts, you might choose a membership duration of a year plus a few days so that you can reach the customers on your list when Valentine’s Day comes around the next year.”
The AdWords default membership duration is set at 30 Days but can be adjusted to 540 days for display, and 180 for search remarketing. At this point, the visitor’s cookie is then removed from the list after the allotted time has been reached. If the visitor comes back, it will start all over again.
Determining Membership Duration Length
Membership duration varies from business to business. Typically for low average order value ecommerce or Lead gen accounts, the highest converting membership durations will be between 1 – 14 days. While bigger ticket (more expensive) items, may have a longer conversion funnel, which would be better having longer membership durations 30+.
If you aren’t sure what the best membership duration cycle is for your account, one way you can get some insight into this is through Google Analytics.
In Google Analytics if you are using the ecommerce pixel, just select:
- Conversions
- Ecommerce
- Time to Purchase
This will give you an idea of your purchase cycle and what to set your membership duration at. As you can see in the image below, majority of the purchases are happening within the first 7 days. There are a few stragglers 28+ days out.
Membership Duration Segmentation Case Study
For this particular client we decided to segment our list into 3 membership durations – 30 days, 60 days and 90 days. Below are the steps we took to set up the membership duration list segments.
- Create a new remarketing list targeting any site that contains your main domain. Creating the new list will allow you to adjust your membership duration – set it for 30, 60 or 90 days
- Create a new custom combination remarketing list
- Select the audience list that was just created – 30, 60 or 90 and None of Converters and the other lists
- Create an AdGroup for each Membership Duration segment audience list
As you can see in the case study below, majority of the conversions are coming through during the first 30 Days and bids have been adjusted accordingly. There are still a few stragglers coming through 90 days out but at a significantly lower CPA.
Let us know what other success stories you’ve had with Remarketing segmentation!
