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Docs  /  Dunning

Data & Testing

How to test Churn Buster end-to-end with real data and verify a campaign behaves the way you expect.

Churn Buster data allows you to accurately measure retention and keep passive churn to a minimum.

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Metrics

Dashboard and Recovery Rate

Campaigns start as soon as failed payments are detected. These accumulate in the dashboard based on the month the campaign starts.

Monthly data generally summarizes near the end of the following month, when all campaigns have finalized.

Churn Buster dashboard showing recovery rate and monthly campaign totals
Recovery rate calculates based on either the monetary amount recovered divided by the total monetary amount of failed payments — or customers recovered divided by total customers who failed payment.

Campaigns end when the payment is either recovered or lost:

Chart showing the four campaign outcomes: Card Updates, Retries, Active Churn, and Passive Churn
  1. Card Updates. When payments are recovered after customers submit new cards, the campaign is tracked as a Card Update win.
  2. Retries. Retry recoveries occur when payments are cleared by retrying the same card that initially failed.
  3. Active Churn. Customers who actively cancel during their campaign are tracked as losses and count against your recovery rate.
  4. Passive Churn. Customers who reach the end of the campaign without a successful recovery are classified as Passive Churn.

Note: Churn Buster provides an overall view of failed payment recovery, with no distinction made in terms of recovery source (for example, retries triggered by Recharge vs. Churn Buster). Specific source attribution can be verified in Churn Buster customer profiles and your subscription management tool.

Campaign Metrics

The campaign view shows performance at each step of the process:

Campaign view showing performance metrics for each step of a dunning campaign

Testing Guidelines

When testing your process, make sure proper methods are used to compare and interpret results.

Active cancellations

Active cancellations for customers with failed payments are accounted for in your Churn Buster recovery rate. Other analytics tools might exclude these in dunning calculations.

Recovery window

Churn Buster tracks recovery throughout the defined recovery window (by default: 25-28 days). Ensure external analytics tools don't cut off tracking after a specific time.

Adequate testing time

Early results after making a change may be attributable to the earlier process and customers running through overlapped processes, so build in sufficient transition time when testing changes to your dunning process.

Also make sure the test runs long enough to track statistically-representative results.

Natural variance

Even with the exact same process running, you'll see ups and downs in your recovery rate. Look at the big picture of how external factors influence recovery rate.

A/B Testing

Pro accounts can conduct A/B tests to optimize specific elements of the campaign. The Churn Buster team sets these up, with careful monitoring to ensure validity and statistical significance.

Data Export and Further Analysis

You can export campaign data from the Customers section to plug it into other data tools or conduct further analysis.

  • EXAMPLE: Passive Churn Cohort Analysis (Google Sheet). This spreadsheet shows an example of how to use the VLOOKUP formula to correlate Churn Buster data with data from your subscription management tool.
  • Pro accounts have access to custom export fields like product_name, decline_reason, customer_location, and more. Contact the Churn Buster team to add custom fields.