New GA4 Audience Templates for eCommerce
- Brady Hancock
- Dec 3
- 4 min read
On Dec. 1, Google released two new suggested audience templates: High-Value Purchasers and Disengaged Purchasers.
These templates are designed to support decision-making & audience-building capabilities for customer retention & retargeting efforts. Below, we will cover the ‘what’, ‘why’, & ‘how’ to give you a clear picture of how you can leverage these new audiences in GA4 to optimize your paid channel performance.
High-Value Purchaser GA4 Audience: Maximizing Profitability Through Retention
What It Is: Audience Definition
The High-Value Purchaser audience is a suggested audience template in GA4 that allows you to segment users based on their Lifetime Value (LTV).
Definition: Users that bring in the most lifetime revenue.
New Feature: A new LTV percentile field allows you to select the top percentile of users to include in the list.
Why It Matters: Strategic Advantage
The ability to isolate this segment directly influences your bottom line.
Focus Resources: It allows you to isolate your highest-value customer segment, ensuring you focus your ad spend and resources on users who contribute the most revenue.
Smarter Acquisition: This list is crucial for building lookalike segments in Google Ads to find high-quality new customers, particularly when used with the new customer acquisition goal in "high-value new customer mode".
How To Leverage It: Customization
While the template provides a starting point, the flexibility to customize the criteria to match your business's true VIP profile is where the power of this audience lives.
Customizing LTV and Purchases: Instead of using the default LTV Percentile (> 84%), you can set precise thresholds. For example, you can set LTV > $1,000 or target users with Purchases > 5 to set a clear, definitive benchmark based on your average order value and purchase frequency metrics.
Targeting the Top Tier: Use the LTV percentile and change the setting to LTV Percentile > 90 to focus advertising effort only on your absolute most valuable segment for highly exclusive offers.
Membership Duration: because this audience is centered around LTV, it makes sense to extend this audience well beyond the default 30 day mark to hold on to key revenue-producers for retargeting audiences or lookalike segments. Consider changing the duration condition to from anywhere between 180 & 365 days.
Disengaged Purchaser GA4 Audience: Driving Repeat Sales Through Re-engagement
What It Is: Audience Definition
The Disengaged Purchaser audience is a suggested template designed to identify past customers who have not recently made a purchase.
Definition: Users that once purchased on the website or app, but have not purchased in a certain number of days
New Feature: ‘True in the most recent period’ field that allows you to select a time frame to indicate a disengaged purchaser.
Why It Matters: Strategic Advantage
This audience directly addresses the high-ROI activity of customer retention.
Win-Back Efficiency: It provides a precise list of lapsed buyers who have already converted once, making them significantly warmer leads than new prospects.
Retention Goal Alignment: This audience aligns directly with the retention goal in Google Ads, allowing you to use "re-engagement mode or retention only mode" to target them effectively.
How To Leverage It: Customization
The most critical customization is defining the time window for "disengaged" based on your product's natural purchase cycle.
Setting the Churn Window: If your product has a 45-day re-order cycle, you should set the event count = 0 in the 45-day period. This targets the customer immediately upon missing that window. Note: The time window for this event count condition is limited to a maximum of 60 days in GA4.
Filtering Purchase Events: You can add or remove purchase events specific to your platform (e.g., exclude low-value in-app purchases) to ensure your win-back efforts are focused only on previously qualified buyers.
Adding Advanced Logic: Use item-scoped dimensions like item category or item name to narrow the audience to customers who previously purchased products with high-retention sales or target them with ads for a different product of interest.
Essential Prerequisites
Accurate purchase tracking is the core prerequisite for these two new audiences.
Disengaged Purchasers: Requires the purchase event tracking.
High-Value Purchasers: Requires the purchase event tracking, specifically with a value event parameter, to allow GA4 to calculate Lifetime Value (LTV) and LTV percentile.
Before enabling these audiences, it's recommended that a review of eCommerce purchase tracking for GA4 is performed to ensure this interaction is being properly tracked & is providing additional parameters such as value, item data, transaction ID, etc.
🔗 Integration: GA4 Reports to Google Ads Campaigns
The ultimate measurement payoff comes from the seamless integration of these audiences between Google Analytics and Google Ads. Linking Your Accounts
To utilize these audiences and dynamic remarketing in Google Ads campaigns, your GA4 property must be linked.
Action: Ensure your GA4 property is linked with your Google Ads account under Admin > Product Links.
These new audiences are specifically aligned to customer lifecycle goals within Google Ads campaigns. With properly configured event tracking & linked accounts, GA4 data is now able to automatically import audience data to Google Ads to provide the intelligence needed to run smarter acquisition and retention campaigns.
Acquisition Campaigns: Use the High-Value Purchasers audience to fuel the new customer acquisition goal in high-value new customer mode.
Retention Campaigns: Use the Disengaged Purchasers audience to drive the retention goal in re-engagement mode or retention only mode.
Ready to Maximize Your Customer Segments?
These new audiences could be very beneficial, but their effectiveness depends entirely on precise tracking configuration and campaign validation.
If you need assistance with:
Ensuring your purchase event and value parameter are correctly configured in GA4.
Building and customizing these High-Value and Disengaged Purchaser audiences.
Setting up your Google Ads campaigns to properly utilize these segments.
Developing reports to measure the ROI of your retargeting efforts.
...reach out to Measure Marketing Pro today. Let us handle the technical configuration and reporting validation so you can focus on scaling your business with confidence!
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