Revenue Report

Quick Reference

Introduction

Chances are, you are using analytics to increase the number of people using your product, so that they can ultimately increase your revenue. The Revenue Report gives you an overall picture of your revenue. Furthermore, you can segment your paying customers using your existing KISSmetrics properties. For example, you might be interested in…

• How much revenue did I make this month compared to last month?
• Which of my pricing plans is contributing the most revenue?
• Which ads have brought in the most paying customers?
• What referring sites do most paying customers come from?
• How much did an A/B test affect revenue?

How do I pass in revenue data?

The Revenue Report looks for a single KISSmetrics Property across all customers. In our examples, we call this property Billing Amount. But you can use any other property name, as long as you are consistent across all customers.

Typically, you'll only include the net amount, minus tax and shipping:

# Ruby example. When madeup@person.com is billed for $29.99, execute:
KM.identify('madeup@person.com')
KM.record('Billed', {'Billing Amount' => 29.99 })

Refunds can also inform your total revenue. Pass in the refunded value under the same Billing Amount property with a negative value:

# Ruby example. When madeup@person.com is refunded $29.99, execute:
KM.identify('madeup@person.com')
KM.record('Refunded', {'Billing Amount' => -29.99 })

Remember, there are many ways to send us event data. You might find it most accurate to import data from another data source that's already keeping track of each transaction.

Revenue Mapping

Once you have Billing Amount data recorded with KISSmetrics, we do our best to find and use the property name where the data is located. If the information in the report looks really strange, please check your site's property mappings to ensure that your Revenue property is actually using the correct property under which you provided revenue data.

Total Customers

The revenue report can also look into your data to see how many paying customers you still have.

• Paying Customers: - the number of people we count as still "actively paying". That is, this is a count of people who we have recorded Revenue from, and who have not churned. Churn is explained in the next section.
• Paying Customers Gained: - the number of people whose first recorded Revenue happened in the time frame you're looking at.
• Paying Customers Lost: - the number of people who have churned, which is explained in the next section.

Churn - What about customers who stop paying?

In addition to revenue, we can show you the number of customers gained and lost over the date range you're reporting on. Churn describes customers who are no longer active and are no longer contributing revenue. Each business type tends to calculate churn differently. By default, KISSmetrics uses a SaaS 30-day subscription model to determine churn.

• If you are not sending in an event for Cancelations (Canceled), then we use our calculation to determine Churn. If a customer has not paid you in 30 days, we consider them churned on the last day that they paid.
• If you do send us a Canceled event, we consider a customer churned on the day of their cancelation. (Like Revenue, if Cancelations look strange, please check your site's event mappings to ensure that the Canceled event is using the event that corresponds with cancelations.)

We realize that these two options may not sufficiently define churn for every business. For example, you may be an e-commerce business that doesn't track explicit cancelations, but gives customers longer than 30 days until you consider them churned. If so, we're interested in hearing how you define churn, and how you would use a Revenue Report most effectively. Please send in your feedback using the feedback box at the bottom of the Revenue Report!

Lifetime Value

Lifetime Value (LTV) is a prediction of how much a single customer will provide you in their time as a paying customer. There are many mathematical models for calculating LTV. Our report uses this one:

Lifetime Value = Average Revenue per Customer / Total Churn Rate

To simplify further:

Lifetime Value = (Total Revenue / Total Customers) /
   (Total Number of People who Churned / Total Customers)
Lifetime Value = Total Revenue / Number of People who Churned

This means that if no one has churned, we can't make a prediction of your customers' LTV (we can't divide by 0).

Segmenting Revenue

As mentioned above, you can segment your revenue and customers using your existing KISSmetrics properties. Some example questions you might answer:

• Which of my pricing plans is contributing the most revenue?
• Which ads have brought in the most paying customers?
• What referring sites do most paying customers come from?
• How much of an effect did an A/B test affect revenue?

Note: remember that we track a person's lifecycle on your site, which includes every referral source they took to reach your site. Choosing First ever or Last ever lets you attribute a person to either the first property they received (usually for Referrer or Campaign Name), or to the most recent property.

Contributed by Eric Fung