Segmenting Types of Revenue

Sandstorm properties are designed to help you segment people. It’s great for looking at the first-touch attribution data that brought visitors to your site, but when you want to report on the different ways revenue is generated, you’ll find it useful to add more properties to provide the data structure you’re looking for.

One example of segmenting revenue instead of segmenting people is if you are comparing one-time purchases vs. recurring revenue. In these cases, an individual customer may pay you through a mix of one-time purchases and recurring billing.

What do I need to do?

To tease apart the different revenue channels, let’s create new properties, each of which is responsible for data from only one type of revenue.

Here is a JavaScript code example:

// For Person 1 "foo"
_kmq.push(['identify', 'foo']);
_kmq.push(['record', 'Billed', {
  'Billing Amount':90,
  'Revenue Type':'Recurring',
  'Subscription Billing Amount':90}]);   // The key part
// For Person 2 "bar"
_kmq.push(['identify', 'bar']);
_kmq.push(['record', 'Billed', {
  'Billing Amount':45,
  'Revenue Type':'One-Time',
  'One-Time Revenue':45}]);   // The key part

What’s different about this structure?

With the data isolated into predefined buckets, you can narrow in on each bucket in turn to look at your revenue in different ways:

• Billing Amount: use our “total over a property” metric to find Total Revenue, regardless of where the revenue came from.

• Subscription Billing Amount: use our “total over a property” metric to find Total Recurring Revenue, which excludes revenue from one-time purchases.

• One-Time Revenue: use our “total over a property” metric to find Total Revenue from One-Time Purchases, which excludes recurring revenue.

• Revenue Type: Segment people based on whether their first or last charge was a Recurring charge or a One-Time charge.

Additional Notes

If one transaction contains both recurring and one-time charges, you could combine all the properties under one Billed Event

Example:

_kmq.push(['identify', 'baz']);
_kmq.push(['record', 'Billed', {
  'Billing Amount':135, // To total up all revenue from this person
  'Revenue Type':'Both',
  'Subscription Billing Amount':90, // To total up recurring revenue
  'One-Time Revenue':45,  // To total up revenue from one-time purchases
}]);

The properties you add can be combined with our other recommendations for Tracking SaaS Revenue.