What Smart Marketers Should Know About Recency

Digital marketers know that curating informed, specific audience segments goes a long way in making the most of their budgets. But what if there was an additional way to look at audience data and make your budget strategy more effective?

Recency is an optimization many campaigns overlook, but it can make a huge difference when deciding how to spend your marketing budget. Plus, recency adjustments help you to better serve your customers—a crucial part of any digital plan.

Keep reading to learn how this one change can help your team design more efficient and successful campaigns. 

What Is Recency?

Recency refers to the length of time that has passed since a user first visits your site. Once the initial visit occurs, the clock starts on the user’s recency calendar. Using this valuable data, ecommerce teams can make adjustments to create higher bids for newer users—i.e., people more likely to meaningfully engage with and benefit from retargeting ads.

Adjusting bids based on recency also makes campaigns more customer friendly. By decreasing bid amounts for users who first visited your site weeks or months ago, you avoid creating the sense that customers are being “followed” around the internet. Considering that many consumers find it “annoying” or even “creepy” when they’re targeted by ads for too long, it makes sense to fine-tune your strategy.

Optimizing recency is also effective because it utilizes group data. As online privacy becomes more important and metrics used for measurement change, recency is a good place to look for group data to inform future campaign decisions in significant and relevant ways. 

Improve Data Quality With Recency Optimization

The most important ways to use recency optimization are through data segmentation and determining campaign goals. 

Data Segmentation

You already have curated, quality user data. But if the majority of your audience segments are based on demographic information, you’re missing out on offering a more personalized experience.

While demographic data is essential to creating audience segments, refining segments with recency creates a clearer picture of your audience and their brand experience thus far. Forgo optimizing recency, and you could continue targeting less interested customers who are no longer actively engaged in the purchasing process.

Going beyond demographic information and segmenting based on the overall frequency and recency rates of your current audience can help determine which retargeting campaign will be most effective for each segment. 

Campaign Goals

Similar to changing campaign measurements to account for the pandemic, adding recency to your digital strategy toolkit means reevaluating campaign goals and windows.

With your new recency-optimized user data, you’ll have a better idea of which retargeting campaign fits each audience segment best. Plus, adding recency data to campaign overviews helps uncover which campaign windows can be altered. This allows you to zero out bids sooner on less effective campaigns while spending the remaining budget elsewhere.

Now it’s time to create recency schedules with customized and strategic bid factors.

How to Optimize Recency for More Efficient Spending

The length of a recency schedule will vary by campaign. A campaign designed to build brand awareness would have different goals and a different timeline than a more bottom-of-funnel plan.

Your industry and product play big roles in setting the schedule as well. For example, a person buying dish towels will likely make a purchase decision more quickly than someone buying a golf cart. A few other factors to consider when determining a schedule include:

• The seasonality of your product

• Your company’s or product’s typical sales cycle (both in-season and out, if applicable)

• The number of purchase opportunities for related products

With this information in mind, adjust a campaign’s bid amount to favor the most recent visitors, then taper the budget over time. This ensures the majority of your budget is focused on potential customers who are still engaged in the sales cycle instead of people who are no longer looking to purchase.

Optimizing with recency data helps maximize your marketing budget while simultaneously personalizing the customer experience. With a little bit of research and a few minor tweaks, recency adjustments will improve the quality of your data and create a better online experience for your customers.