Why purchase propensity matters in 2025
Google Trends shows searches for “purchase propensity model” up 78 % YoY (July 2025) as brands race to protect margins in a cookie-less world. McKinsey puts personalisation gains at +10–20 % revenue uplift when grounded in propensity scores McKinsey & Company, while BCG finds 4 in 5 consumers now expect predictive, context-aware experiences BCG Global.
Measuring propensity in Google Analytics 4
GA4 ships three native predictive metrics—Purchase probability, Churn probability and Predicted revenue—trained on your first-party events and refreshed daily. Purchase probability forecasts the chance that an active user will trigger an ecommerce purchase event in the next 7 days. Event Information Google Analytics.
Read more: GA4 product-data dimensions explained
Minimum data thresholds
- ≥1,000 returning purchasers & ≥1,000 non-purchasers in the past 28 days
When thresholds are met, GA4 surfaces a propensity distribution you can:
- Export to BigQuery to build custom models (e.g. XGBoost, logistic regression) Google CloudAIPort Labs
- Create predictive audiences (e.g. “90-day high-propensity new users”) and share with Google Ads for smart bidding.
3. Enriching GA4 with CRM & order data
GA4 alone lacks margin, inventory and offline value signals. Forward-thinking CMOs now:
| Step | Action | Tooling |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Daily BigQuery export of GA4 user and event tables | Native connector |
| 2 | ETL sales ledger (SKU, net margin, promo code, CLTV) from ERP/CRM to BigQuery | Cloud Data Fusion / Fivetran |
| 3 | Identity stitching via hashed email / User-ID to create a customer 360 table | BigQuery SQL |
| 4 | Feature store: recency-frequency-monetary variables, coupon usage, NPS | Vertex AI Feature Store |
| 5 | AutoML / XGBoost for probability-of-next-purchase & expected margin | Vertex AI Pipelines Google Cloud |
Read more about: GA4-CRM integration guide
Marketing activation playbook
- Email & SMS: Progressive discounts triggered when probability is 40-60% but margin is≥20%.
- Web personalisation: reorder widgets for 80%+ propensity cohort; suppress promotions for 5% tier.
- Paid media: feed high-propensity IDs to Google Ads Optimised Target ROAS; reduce spend on low propensity+low-margin segment.
Harvard Business School reminds us that incremental margin, not raw conversion rate, should anchor the model’s target metric Harvard Business School.
AI search companions and why CMOs should care
- Google AI Overviews & AI Mode now reach 1.5 bn users and surface shoppable links inside generative answers blog.google.
- Perplexity Sonar outperforms Gemini 2.5 Pro and GPT-4o in Search Arena tests and offers an API for instant competitive research Perplexity AI.
- Microsoft Copilot is rolling out Copilot Agents; 230k orgs already use them to mine CRM data in seconds. The Official Microsoft Blog.
- OpenAI GPT-4o update adds deeper personalisation controls, useful for dynamic copy generation OpenAI.
Tip: Feed your GA4-CRM propensity scores into these copilots via API to auto-draft channel-specific creative that reflects each user’s likelihood to buy.
Future-proofing with Gen AI personalisation
BCG shows that brands using AI-powered personalisation grow share of wallet 2–3× faster BCG Global. Mistral’s premier models and Google Gemini 2.0 Flash now bring near-GPT-4 reasoning at lower latency and cost, making real-time propensity scoring feasible on-site docs.mistral.ai blog.google.
Conclusion
In a privacy-tightening, AI-accelerated landscape, the winners will be retailers that:
- Treat GA4 predictive metrics as a starting point, not the finish line.
- Enrich with CRM signals—margin, returns, support tickets—to reflect true value.
- Serve high-propensity users first while nurturing low-propensity prospects with education.
- Plug propensity outputs into AI search agents and marketing copilots for always-on optimisation.
By unifying first-party data and modern AI tooling, CMOs can finally get ahead of the endless promotion cycle and focus on profitable, sustainable growth.
References (APA 7)
- Boston Consulting Group. (2024, December 12). What consumers want from personalization.
- Cloud Architecture Center. (2024, June 25). Use Vertex AI pipelines for propensity modeling on Google Cloud. Google.
- Google. (2025, May 15). AI Mode in Google Search: Updates from I/O 2025.
- Google Analytics Help. (2025). Predictive metrics.
- Harvard Business School. (2016). Customer profitability and lifetime value (Background Note 503-XXX).
- McKinsey & Company. (2025, April 12). How gen AI can take customer personalization to the next level.
- Microsoft. (2025, May 19). Microsoft Build 2025: The age of AI agents and building the open agentic web.
- MIT Sloan Management Review. (2024, January 2). Use data to your advantage in 2024.
- Mistral AI. (2025). Models overview.
- OpenAI. (2025, May 14). Sycophancy in GPT-4o: What happened and what we’re doing about it.
- Perplexity. (2025, February 11). Meet new Sonar: A blazing-fast model optimised for Perplexity Search.
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