There’s understandably a lot of attention paid to the first order a customer places.
Which ad brought them in? Which channel? Which product?
How much did it cost to acquire them, and what was the ROAS? Blended, or in platform?
All useful questions.
But I’m often more interested in what happened next.
Did they buy again? How long did it take? What did they buy?
Did customers who bought Product A first behave differently from customers who bought Product B?
Did one acquisition channel bring in customers who looked expensive initially, but went on to spend far more?
Did another deliver wonderfully cheap first orders from people who never came back?
The first transaction is one moment in a much longer customer relationship.
And looking at acquisition purely through the economics of that first transaction can give a very different picture from looking at the value of the customers it creates.
One of my favourite things to look at is the path taken by the customers who eventually become really valuable.
What did they do differently, and how early could we see it?
Because once you understand that, you’ve got something super valuable – clues about which types of new customers you want more of.
