Gain smarter insights with Recurly Analytics

Recurly has just released new advanced subscription analytics capabilities to help you minimize churn and maximize acquisition and renewals, giving you fast access to the metrics that matter most.

Here’s what’s new — and why it matters to you.

• Faster data access (near real-time refreshes)

• Smarter insights (new filters and drill-down capabilities)

• Flexible access (easily download dashboard/reporting data for further analysis)

Learn more by watching our video below.

Video transcript

Hi, I'm Locke Truong, senior director of product marketing for Recurly. We all know that data is a lifeblood of your subscription business and that timely access to that rich data can truly make the difference between success and failure. Today, we announce our new subscription analytics updates; which I’ll provide a short overview while my colleague, Karsh Pandey, will give you a product demo of where you can find these new features.

For those not familiar with Recurly, we're a leading subscription and recurring billing management platform that helps automate the subscriber lifecycle at scale. We power over 10 billion in managing ARR, and with our ability to collect and analyze data, we've recovered nearly 800 million in revenue last year alone.

And speaking of data, we're excited to share and showcase some of the new enhancements around our subscription analytics that were recently announced today. Unlike traditional, one-time purchases, the subscription model requires you to not only acquire but retain and grow long-term customer relationships. Although initial transactions are essential to building revenue, subscription success requires the ability to reduce churn and maximize renewals. And that means shifting the focus of KPIs. 

Advanced analytics is critical to subscription success, but many companies today struggle on what, where, and how to access and analyze data to uncover actionable insights.

Today, we're excited to deliver even faster data access, and we're talking near realtime refreshes. Smarter insights, including new filters and drill-down capabilities, flexible access to easily download dashboard and reporting data for further analysis. These updates will allow you to truly unlock that decision-making data so that you can ultimately accelerate acquisitions, minimize churn, and maximize renewals.

So what can you do with these new enhanced analytics? 

Number one: we all know that prospects can be fickle. With our new updates, you'll be able to identify the right products and plans that help attract the highest-value subscribers faster. 

“Always be testing” is the marketer's model. Now you can better discover which coupons of which trials are hitting the mark, and make adjustments in near real time. 

Number three: help identifying which subscribers are at risk of canceling so you can take some proactive action. Which plans and products are churning, and which aren’t? Get ready for some answers.

Ultimately, you have to hit your MRR goals to sustain growth. With enhanced analytics, you'll be able to gain access to MRR and related metrics that matter faster and more accurately than ever.

Number five: which types of customers and which products are most profitable? It sounds like a simple question,  but in our business, it gets a bit cloudy. Enhanced Recurly analytics will give you the right answers at the right time.

Hopefully, this excites you like it does us. Now I'm going to hand off to our resident analytics expert, Karsh Pandey, senior product manager.

My name is Karsh, I am the senior product manager focusing on analytics and hoping to continue to bring more advanced and better experiences to all of you.

So, let me show you what we have so far, and this is something that I am really excited about, we've been working on it a lot. Not only is it going to improve and help you out of the gate, but it's helped set up the foundation for what we plan to do in the future as well. So let's dive right in.

As you log into your Recurly site–if you already have one or you're evaluating Recurly for yourself–you would go into your analytics section, and you first would jump into your dashboard. This, for folks who have been with Recurly before know, analytics is a core element of our platform and we wanted to maintain a similar experience as before, but really take it up a few notches.

So you can see a brand new UX/UI experience, and one of the first things we did was improve our data pipeline so that we can refresh the data much more faster and accurately than before. Before, we were doing it on a daily basis. Now we're able to get the data refreshed within one to one and a half hours. 

So as you come to your dashboard and see this, this gives you a nice overview of what's going on in your business or in your site, from a subscriber, to churn rate, and as you scroll down you start seeing more and more detailed graphs and information that you can identify quick key, metrics about your business to make equally quick and exploited decisions in your business. But more often than not, everybody wants to go into the details or dig into it as well, so you can see we have tons of detailed breakdowns of different elements of the billing cycle and billing process.

So let's jump into one of the most popular ones, you know, which is Billings.  Now as you come here, you can see we've laid out very clear indicators of how much you've collected, but something we've done that wasn't available before is adding many more detailed filters and the ability to slice your data. So here you can see we have the ability, in Billings, to have different time frames, to be able to only focus on payments or refunds, or the net of the two. You can manipulate the date range to be as far back as you want. And to take it even a step further since we have many, many Merchants who are global and operate in multiple currencies, you can even adjust the currency you want to view your data in.

So, as a quick example, let's just change this to the last six months, and we want to see this in a quarterly view. And it's as simple as one, two, three. Now the data refreshes and you can see here how the data has adjusted accordingly.

You can hover over it to get the information you need. You can take this even a step further and you can save it for easier access in the future. And let's say you want to do additional analysis, you know, you looked at the data and you want to join it with other relevant data you have that isn't available in the platform, now more seamlessly than ever, you can download it directly onto your laptop or server and be able to manipulate the data as you want. So you can download as a PDF, download as a CSV, and continue moving forward with whatever analysis or work you're trying to do with the data set that you want to work with.

Now, going back to the different dashboards we have, you know, you can see here how along with the key dashboard, you would come through to see an overview, you can drill into your subscriber behavior, and here you get to see how your subscribers are doing from a similar point of view.

And again, we really try to enhance and enable our Merchants to get this key information without having to have massive data science teams or analytics teams to build all this out. We really want to give the data back to our merchants' hands and be able to have the keys to manipulate it and learn what they need to make the right decisions.

So from there, you can go to plans, and then plans, again you can really drill down into which plans you want to see here. You can either select your top five plans or different versions of it or if you want to see a specific plan and how it's behaving you can go down to that level.

MRR, like Locke mentioned, is a very critical metric in the SaaS business, and here you can see the same level of detail we have in all of our other dashboards, where we've broken down MRR based on the filter set. And we've taken it a step further, you know, one of the biggest reasons we invested in building out this new experience and new tool set is because we plan to invest a lot in our analytics experience - more than before - and not only continue to bring new and advanced experiences to all of you, but also be able to improve our transparency and provide a complete end-to-end experience from an analytic standpoint.

What does that mean? One of the biggest things we've done with this new release is now, for certain dashboards like MRR you can actually drill down to the underlying data to understand how and what is being used to make this up. Data and SaaS businesses move at lightspeed, and sometimes you see these numbers and maybe you've done your own analysis or you have a different data source and things don't line up. We want to enable you to take the next step and further investigate where discrepancies are and identify the source of truth that works for you. And you can go down here, look into the data set, download it as well, and be able to have complete control and trust in the data.

Moving from there, we talked about Billings. Churn analysis is a relevant component that we build out and shows you the same level of detail that we would for any of our dashboards. You can even drill down to see which specific accounts are falling into each of these categories. And we had the plans dashboard before, here we have the planned performance which takes the same information, but spreads it across different lenses and different points of view from key KPIs, to plan movements, to lifetime value, etc. 

And one of the biggest value ads Recurly has is our recovered revenue methodology and controls we have, and this dashboard allows you to see that in action, in realtime, and see how much money you're recovering on a month-to-month basis and be able to rest in peace that you know you have made the right investment within Recurly.

To close this out, along with all of these functionalities, we've also added the ability for you to adjust your timezone if you're traveling and want to take a look at the data from a different timezone perspective. You can go into your profile, adjust your timezone, and be certain that the data you're seeing is reflective of that. 

And to wrap it up, the last dashboard I want to quickly show is our dunning effectiveness dashboard. This is one of the new ones we've released in the last couple of months, and it's an example of what we are planning to do with this new platform and continue to not only give and present new features and benefits from our analytics but also show how it's working for you and where you can learn more about it.

Hopefully, this has been helpful, but if you ever need more information please feel free to reach out to your AE or CSM, or our documentation is very thorough and has even more detail than I covered, but I'll turn it back to Locke now.

Thanks, Karsh. That was some exciting stuff. Hopefully, the viewers haven't dropped off already to start accessing these new analytic updates. I've just got a couple of more things that I'd like to share. 

Lastly, quick PSA, we are always looking for EAP or Early Access participants, so if you're interested in being the first (or one of the first) to access some of our latest innovations before it becomes generally available, please reach out to us by emailing us at that email address that you see on the screen.

Thank you for joining us today, we hope the information was helpful, and we hope to see you guys again soon. Have a great day!