Using the Audience Lookback Window Strategically
Use the Lookback Window feature when building Untitled Audiences to segment your website visitors by the recency of their activity, and tailor your marketing accordingly.
What is the Lookback Window?
7 day window: keeps the user in the audience for a week before removing them. Great for high-buyer-intent, urgency-based email retargeting
30 day window: keeps the user in the audience for a month before removing them. Great for digital retargeting on the Untitled DSP, or Meta (Facebook) and Google Ads.
60-90 day window: keeps the user in the audience for two or three months before removing them. Great for higher-priced items with a longer consideration phase (i.e. furniture, automotive, etc).
180-365 day window: keeps the user in the audience for 6 months to a year before removing them. Great for seasonal businesses looking to re-engage past browsers who may have missed the "peak" season.
All-time window: users are never removed from the audience. Great for generating lookalike audiences in advertising channel like Meta (Facebook) and Google Ads, or pushing audiences into the Untitled DSP.
When you filter your Untitled Visitor Table into Audiences, you create segments of your website visitors that may need different marketing approaches. If you sell apparel, visitors only to the Men’s Collection probably don’t need to see advertising for your Women’s Collection.
With the “Lookback Window” feature, you can also segment your website visitors by the recency of their visit, plus demographic and website activity data.
Short-term Audiences for aggressive retargeting
Imagine you run an online apparel company with a widely-priced range of products, from luxury evening gowns to socks.
A visitor to the website visits a URL containing /collections/mens-socks, has a buyer intent of “Hot”, also visits the cart page, but is not an existing customer of yours, meaning that the cart was abandoned. This buyer intends to purchase a relatively low-priced product soon, and socks are a hard-to-differentiate product with lower absolute margin than other apparel items.
Creating an Audience with a Lookback Window of 7 days puts this visitor (and other visitors with this behavior) into an Untitled Audience you might name “Men’s Socks 7-day-lookback” for 7 days before being automatically removed. During this 7 day period, you likely want to market to this visitor aggressively before they decide to purchase elsewhere.
You might sync this Audience to a Facebook/Meta Ad Campaign with a high bid, since you know the buyer is primed to purchase, and you’d like to turn them into a customer of yours, not your competitors.
After 7 days, if the aggressive marketing on Meta hasn’t captured this website visitor, it may not make sense to continue to spend marketing dollars chasing this sale, which likely went elsewhere, and the visitor doesn’t need more socks at this time.
Long-term Audiences for relationship building
Although you missed the sale this time, you still have an interested website visitor who you can remain in contact with on a lower-cost platform, like email.
Your website visitors can be members of an unlimited number of Audiences; in addition to the Audience imagined above, this website visitor would also be eligible for an Audience of all visitors to any collection containing the word “mens”. An appropriate Lookback Window for this Audience is “all-time”.
This broader audience might be synced with your Klaviyo email marketing account, from which you send a monthly newsletter announcing new releases and sales. This keeps you in front of the website visitor, building awareness without driving up cost or overwhelming the visitor.
Customizable Lookback Window = adaptable marketing strategy
Based on your typical sales cycle duration, your target cost-per-acquisition, and your outbound marketing channels, you can create any number of Audiences in Untitled, creating efficient advertising when and where your website visitors need to see it. Move website visitors from higher-urgency, higher-cost campaigns when they show Hot buyer intent, to lower-cost, relationship-building campaigns after the purchase window has passed.
If you’re not sure which Lookback Window is best for a new Audience, consider creating one Audience that is a 90 day lookback and another that is identical, but an “All time” lookback. Visitors within the last 90 days will likely still have some brand awareness, even if they haven’t heard from you in a few months, and an All time audience gives you a broad pool of visitors to target. Test your campaigns across these Audiences and hone in from there.
Use cases for the Audience Lookback Window
New-parent items, where shopping may begin 180 days before purchase, during pregnancy.
Higher-end clothes like an evening gown or suit that may be considered for 60 days or more and which margin may support longer paid marketing campaigns.
Seasonal lawn care items, which may merit an All-Time Audience, but one which only need to be aggressively marketed to for a short period each year.
Cars or furniture, which may have a 90-day shopping period, but are infrequently purchased.
Highly-gifted items like toys which may warrant a 365 day Audience, capturing those website visitors who considered purchasing last year, but did not convert.
Limited time offers for recent visitors, with ad copy like “3 days left to save!” for an Audience with a 7 day lookback, encouraging conversions without diluting your brand as “always on sale”.
Further questions about the Lookback Window and how to use it? Contact us at [email protected]
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