Subscription analytics: the metrics, the data and a 12-month cohort example

Your billing system shows how much recurring revenue you have. Subscription analytics explains why it changes, by joining revenue with who subscribers are and how they use the product. This guide lists the metrics with formulas, shows where the data comes from, and walks through a 12-month cohort with three findings billing alone would have missed.

What is subscription analytics?

Subscription analytics is the measurement of how a subscription business acquires, keeps, expands and loses recurring revenue. It covers revenue metrics such as MRR, churn and net revenue retention, and, increasingly, the product usage behind them: which subscribers use the product, which are about to leave, and which are ready to upgrade.

A billing system can tell you what happened to revenue. Subscription analytics joins that with who the subscribers are and what they do, so you can explain the numbers and act before they move.

Key subscription metrics

Always report MRR movements, not just the total: new, expansion, contraction, churned and reactivated MRR explain why the total changed.

Normalize annual plans to monthly MRR.

Where the data comes from

• Billing system (Stripe, Paddle, Chargebee, App Store, Google Play): subscriptions, invoices, plan changes, refunds, failed payments.
• Product analytics: logins, feature use, seats used, key actions.
• CRM and support: account owner, segment, tickets, NPS.

The most valuable analysis happens where these meet: usage by plan, churn by activity level, expansion by feature adopted. That requires a shared identifier, the subscriber or account ID, on both billing and product events.

Worked example: what twelve months of subscription data showed

A SaaS product with monthly and annual plans analyzed subscribers who started in one quarter and followed them for 12 months (sample figures):

Three findings came from joining billing with usage:

• Usage in month 2 predicted churn. Monthly subscribers with fewer than 2 active days a week in their second month churned at 11.4% a month, against 3.8% for the rest, three times higher. The team started an outreach program for that group in week 6.
• Involuntary churn was larger than expected. 5% of monthly renewals failed on the first payment attempt; automatic retries and card-update emails recovered 62% of them, leaving 1.9% of renewals lost to payment failure. With monthly churn around 5.3%, that was more than a third of it, and none of it was in the cancellation survey.
• Annual plans were not only stickier because of the contract. Annual subscribers used the product more from week 1, so part of the difference was selection. Offering annual billing to engaged monthly subscribers in month 3 moved 14% of them to annual without a discount deeper than the existing one.

How to set up subscription analytics

1. Define metrics once: what counts as MRR (exclude one-off fees, normalize annual plans to monthly), when a subscription is churned (at cancellation or at period end).
2. Send subscription events from the server: started, renewed, upgraded, downgraded, cancelled, payment failed, payment recovered, with plan and amount.
3. Identify subscribers in the product with the same ID used in billing.
4. Build the MRR bridge monthly: new, expansion, contraction, churn, reactivation.
5. Track cohorts by start month, plan and acquisition channel, for logo and revenue retention.
6. Add usage health: active days, key feature use, seats used, as leading indicators for churn and expansion.
7. Separate voluntary and involuntary churn, and record cancellation reasons for the voluntary part.

Common mistakes

• Counting annual payments as one month's MRR. Normalize to monthly.
• Reporting only blended churn. Monthly and annual plans behave very differently.
• Ignoring failed payments. Involuntary churn is often the easiest revenue to recover.
• Analyzing billing without usage. You see who left, not why or who is next.
• Client-side revenue events. Ad blockers and closed tabs lose them; send billing events from the server.

Subscription analytics in TapCub

Send subscription events from your server (Send server-side events) and identify subscribers with the same user ID as in billing (Identify users). The B2B / SaaS industry pack under All-platform analytics › Business › Industry packs defines events such as trial_started, subscription_started (with plan and mrr), subscription_upgraded, payment_succeeded and subscription_cancelled, and adds metrics for new, expansion and churned MRR, subscription churn rate and trial conversion, plus SaaS growth and product adoption dashboards. Group accounts to analyze at company level (Analyze accounts with groups). Related reading: SaaS metrics, Revenue growth rate and Cancellation reasons.

Sources

• Stripe documentation, Smart Retries: recovering failed subscription payments.