chapter three

3 Measuring customers

 

This chapter covers

  • Measuring counts, averages and totals of customer events
  • Running Quality Assurance tests on the resulting metrics
  • Choosing appropriate time periods and timestamps for event measurement
  • Measuring the length of time a customer has been on the service
  • Measuring monthly recurring revenue and other metrics of subscriptions

If you are operating any kind of product or service with repeated interactions with users or customers then you should be collecting data about those interactions in some kind of data warehouse. Interactions in this context means interactions between the user and the product, service or platform (it may also include interactions with other users mediated by the platform.) It is common to refer to such interactions as events for short, because interactions tracked in a data warehouse invariably have a timestamp telling you when it happened.

DEFINITION

An event is a generic term for any fact about user behavior on your system stored in the data warehouse with a specific timestamp.

But I am not going to teach you how to collect that data; I am going to teach you how to put that data to good use. The first step in putting the raw data to use in fighting churn is to turn the event data into a set of measurements that summarize the events and collectively produce a profile of the users’ behaviors. These measurements are often called behavioral metrics or just metrics for short.

3.1 From events to metrics

3.2 Event data warehouse schema

3.3 Counting events in one time period

3.4 Details of Metric Period Definitions

3.4.1 Weekly behavioral cycles

3.4.2 Timestamps for metric measurements

3.5 Making measurements at different points in time

3.5.1 Overlapping measurement windows

3.5.2 Timing metric measurements

3.5.3 Saving metric measurements

3.6 Measuring totals and averages of event properties

3.7 Metric quality assurance

3.7.1 Testing how metrics change over time

3.7.2 Checking how many accounts receive metrics

3.8 Event quality assurance

3.8.1 Checking how events change over time

3.8.2 Checking events per Account

3.9 Selecting the measurement period for behavioral measurements