This guide will help you understand:

• What the use case does
• How to set up the Use Case
• How to further customize the Use Case
• How to evaluate the dashboard

What this Use Case does and why we developed it

Problem

Customer retention helps make the customers you worked hard to acquire stay and continue purchasing your products. You can efficiently improve the retention and loyalty of your customers if you understand the insights from your existing customer base. However, you can get easily lost in your customer retention analysis without grouped and understandable data.

Solution

We developed the Retention Dashboard to give you a ready-made solution for analyzing and visualization of the retention and loyalty of your customers. All the essential metrics around retention and loyalty, such as the average times between purchases, are within one dashboard, allowing for easy understanding and evaluation.

This use case

The Retention Dashboard Use Case provides insight into customer retention cohorts or shop retention metrics, such as repeat rate, last month retention, 3 months cohort repeat rate, and the average time between purchases. It also gives you insight into a session return funnel with a focus on non-subscribers.

What is included in this use case:

• Custom Evaluation Dashboard
• Pre-built metrics and reports

1. Set up the Use Case

(1) Check the requirements

The following event tracking within the project is required:

• Consent event with event attributes:
  • action (accept / reject)
• Purchase event with event attributes:
  • total_price
  • purchase_status
• Cart_update event with attributes:
  • product_list: JSON
• Session_start

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If your data are tracked differently than described above, make sure that Data Manager > Data Mapping is set up for your project. This will enable you to map crucial data to your project naming conventions. For more information, see article about cloning.

Address any discrepancies if needed.

(2) Adjust the reports and assets

Go through the assets below and make necessary adjustments:

• Purchase event (optional) - all the assets and reports are working with a purchase event defined as ‘purchase_status’ equals ‘success’. If the naming conventions in your project are different, please adjust them accordingly.

(3) Test the dashboard

After setting up the dashboard, go through the numbers and check if they might correspond to the reality of your project. Observe the interdependence of some of the reports as well.

(4) Evaluate on a regular basis

Most important explanations are part of the ‘Retention Dashboard’. For more detailed definitions, go to the ‘Evaluation’ section. Check the evaluation dashboard regularly to spot any need for improvements as soon as possible.

2. Suggestions for custom modifications

Feel free to add any necessary metrics to the dashboard so you can better evaluate the functionality of your business.

3. Evaluate and interpret the dashboard

The dictionary below is helpful for understanding metrics in the evaluation dashboard and their calculation.
You can also find out more about evaluation and how this dashboard works in the 'Other details' section.

Repeat rate - Shows the percentage of your current customer base, who came back to shop and made more than 2 purchases.

Return rate - Measures the percentage of the returning customers in a certain period (i.e. 3-6 months ago) by the buyers who made another purchase in a preceding period (i.e. <3 months ago). For instance, 3-month return rate: Percentage of first-time buyers from 3 to 6 months ago that returned and made another purchase in the last 3 months.

Retention rate - The % of the revenue from returning customers in a given period.

Customer retention cohorts - Group your first-time customers from each month into cohorts and then visualize how much money these groups of customers spent in the subsequent months. It is a solid overview of how much of your revenue in any given month was gained from the first-time buyers and how much from the retained customers. It allows you to see whether you have a solid base of customers or if your business is a one-time stop for most. With this knowledge, you will be able to determine whether your business should focus more on the acquisition or retention of customers.

Monthly purchase retention - This analysis shows how long it takes customers to purchase again and how many customers buy again in the following X amount of months. It helps you gain insights into how often and soon customers return to purchase.

Customer Lifetime Value - The total customer's revenue generated over their entire relationship with a company.