Membership and subscription analytics you should pay attention to

There are a lot of benefits to having a membership site, But creating a membership site is just the beginning. To drive growth, you’ll need access to key metrics that give you the big picture of your membership’s overall health. 

In this article, we're taking a deep dive on the membership analytics you should be paying attention to, how to use them to set your membership KPIs and benchmarks, and where to find the relevant data in your membership admin.  

Note: Different platforms track different metrics. Here, we’ll focus primarily on the metrics available in Kajabi and considered the most important to membership sites and other knowledge products. 

Ready? Let's take a look at the membership analytics and metrics you should be watching and learn how to apply them. 

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Membership analytics you should know

Before we dive in, let’s review some of the key terms related to membership analytics.

Net revenue

Net revenue refers to the amount of money you’ve earned over a set period of time, minus any refunds or discounts. This may be measured monthly, quarterly, or annually. The key here is to look for trends. 

Are sales ticking up over time? Is there a correlation between an ad campaign and the number of sales? How long after an ad runs do sales pick up? Do sales vary at certain times of the month or year?

This insight can help you decide when to launch an ad campaign or when to run special discounts. It will also help you determine realistic KPIs for your marketing campaigns and pipelines.

For example, if sales of your membership always pick up after the new year, it may be that New Year’s resolutions are prompting people to set new goals. Target your audience with an ad campaign that emphasizes just that and builds on the natural momentum you saw tracked in your membership analytics. 

Kajabi also breaks down your revenue and refunds by offer. This tells you which products are your highest performers and how much you’re losing to refunds. 

Subscription metrics

Subscription metrics help you evaluate the overall performance of your business by analyzing things like Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), Average Revenue Per User (ARPU), and Churn.

Monthly recurring revenue

MRR is calculated by either taking the actual monthly subscription revenue and subtracting any discounts, or by taking the monthly average subscription payment and multiplying it by the number of subscribers minus any discounts. 

In subscription-based businesses, profits often trickle in over time. MRR makes it easier to track revenue and growth and can help you set realistic expectations for future revenue.

Average revenue per user 

ARPU measures how much your average user spends. It often gets ignored in favor of MRR, but it’s a very powerful metric because of how much insight it gives you into your members' willingness to invest in your products.

Although the math isn’t difficult, your ARPU can be hard to track if it isn’t included in your platform’s membership analytics — especially if you have multiple subscriptions or multiple levels for subscribers.

Let’s say you create a membership package that has four tiers of subscription plans, plus upsells or special offers. 

• Tier 1 - $0 for access to any free content you provide. 
• Tier 2 - $10 per month for a basic plan that provides access to the free content plus your course. 
• Tier 3 - $50 per month for access to tier two and the Facebook group.
• Tier 4 - $100 per month for access to everything in tier three plus a group coaching session each month.
• Upsells and special offers

Your ARPU will be calculated by dividing your MRR by the number of active users. 

MRR / the number of Active Users = ARPU

If your ARPU is low, it means the majority of your subscribers are only opting in for your free offers. It could also mean you have a lot of inactive subscribers.

A high ARPU, on the other hand, means the majority of your users are opting in at your highest membership levels and that they’re engaging with special offers or upgrading to higher tiers. 

It’s important to know this because it can help you assess your ability to scale. A low ARPU means you’ll have to acquire a lot of subscribers before you have the cash flow to grow or add staff. A high ARPU means you’ll hit financial milestones sooner. And with a good grasp of your ARPU, you’ll know exactly how many subscribers you need to reach a certain revenue goal. 

Churn

Churn refers to the percentage of customers who leave or stop paying over a given period of time. It’s a good measure of your ability to retain members.

A churn rate of less than 5% is usually considered a great retention rate for online memberships. Especially since most experts claim that the average member maintains their membership for about three months. 

But the Online Membership Industry Report, published in 2019 by the Membership Guys, brings good news. They found that 43.86% of membership sites are able to hold their churn rate below 5%. Nearly two-thirds (63%) of members stay subscribed for more than a year and 18.37% for more than two years.

If your churn rate is much higher than that, you may want to survey your members to find out why they’re leaving, because the lower your churn rate the faster you’ll grow.

Customer acquisition is expensive. And with a low churn rate, you won’t lose as much time, energy, or ad spend on acquiring new customers. 

Churn rate is calculated by dividing the number of lost customers by the number of total customers, and then multiplying that number by 100.

(lost customers / total customers) x 100 = churn rate

If you lost 10 customers last month and you had 250 total customers, your formula would look like this:

10 / 250 = .04 

.04 x 100 = 4% monthly churn rate

Again, the math isn’t difficult. However, keeping up with all these numbers on your own can be difficult. That’s why Kajabi includes these metrics as part of your membership analytics page on your dashboard.

Opt-ins

This metric lets you know how your opt-in forms are performing. It shows you which opt-in forms are yielding the highest engagement and whether you have forms that aren’t working at all.

Kajabi’s opt-in analytics report also tells you which landing pages are collecting the most form submissions. This information is vital, especially if you’re running any A/B tests or membership campaigns.

Page views

The page views analytics page tracks the total number of visits users make to a specific page on your site. A single user might visit your page five separate times and your total page views would increase by five. 

The unique page views metric measures the number of individuals who visited that page. That single user who visited five times would only count as one unique page view. That’s why total page views will always outnumber unique page views.

Depending on the membership analytics your platform provides, you should be able to see other metrics as well. For example, with Kajabi you can generate page view reports to see your top five landing pages, offers pages, and website pages ranked by the amount of traffic they received.

Product progress

If your membership is tied to courses, you’ll appreciate these analytics. Here, you can track the progress your members are making in each of your courses or products. 

Kajabi’s progress report will not only track your members’ progress, it will also track the number of logins, their start date, and the date of their last login.

You can view a list for all members (up to a 1,000) or narrow your focus by creating segments. Or you can narrow the report further to see an individual member’s progress.  

Knowing if your members are getting all the way through your course or stalling out at a particular lesson can be invaluable information for improving your members’ success rates.

Offers sold

This metric tells you which offers were sold in a given time frame. It helps you analyze when offers are performing best, and why. 

Did sales increase at the end of an event or after a marketing campaign? Did a social media post or live video directly impact sales? 

The offers-sold report distinguishes between first purchases and regular purchases so you can see how much of your revenue is coming from new vs. existing members or returning customers. 

Return customers is a key indicator for your business because it tells you how loyal your customers are to you and the level of buy-in they have to your brand as a whole.

Affiliate report

Affiliates are a smart way to create additional revenue and build your brand awareness. Kajabi’s Growth and Pro Plans enable you to form partnerships with the Affiliate Program. 

An affiliate report gives you information that will help you analyze the value of individual affiliate relationships. For example, Kajabi’s affiliate report will show you:

• How much revenue each affiliate has generated over a given period of time
• What their total commission was
• The number of conversions they produced
• The total clicks
• Their conversion rate

Why bother with membership analytics?

Your membership analytics are a direct reflection of how well your site is performing. They tell you how well your members are progressing through your course material, where they may be getting stuck, how they engage with the content, how long they stay on as members, and what your key performance indicators (KPIs) should be going forward.

The good news is that you don't have to be a software engineer or a data scientist to understand membership analytics. When you use a platform like Kajabi, everything is easily accessible down to a granular level. You can access all your data from one centralized dashboard so it's easy to understand, even at a glance. 

Membership analytics also give you insight into what drives your members to engage with you. This is critical if you want to create an experience that encourages them to stay engaged. Engagement equals higher customer acquisition, retention, and loyalty.

In short, using membership analytics effectively can be key to the overall success of your site!

Setting your membership KPIs 

Now that you’ve got a good understanding of where your business is performing well and where it needs improvement, it’s time to use that information to set new goals.

Setting goals for your business should be a given. But without a way to measure performance, you won’t know when you’ve reached those goals or what moved the needle.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and metrics are sometimes used interchangeably, but there is a difference. 

Metrics are the numbers that track what’s happening in your business. But these numbers, in and of themselves, don’t help you improve your business. For that, you need to establish KPIs. 

KPIs are the outcomes you’d like to achieve, such as lower churn or higher subscription rates. You only need to set a few KPIs for your business. They should address the areas where you want to see the most growth or improvement. 

For example, if your ARPU is $25 per user and you want to set a goal to raise that number to $35 per user, you’ll need to use the ARPU report in your membership analytics to track your progress.

There are lots of metrics available with analytics tools, but not all of them are necessarily KPIs. In fact, focusing on every metric available can distract you from achieving your stated goals. Instead, focus on information that will have the biggest impact. 

Setting your KPIs

You can have KPIs for your business as a whole, but you can also create KPIs for individual products or areas of your business, like marketing or sales. Either way, you’ll use your membership analytics to help you set KPIs that are meaningful for driving growth. 

So how do you set a KPI? Here’s a high-level overview.

Key Performance Indicators should relate to specific objectives. So when you’re setting a KPI, ask yourself these five questions: 

• What is the desired outcome you’d like to achieve? (This is the KPI.)
• How long will it take to achieve this outcome? (This gives you a specific timeframe.)
• How will this outcome benefit your business or your members? (This verifies it will actually grow your business.)
• Which metric or analytics tool will best measure success? (This helps you identify the metrics you need to measure.)
• What actions or changes can you take to impact the outcome? (This helps you develop marketing strategies to drive growth.)
  

This will help you create KPIs that are focused and relevant to your overall business goals. For example, you might decide to define your KPI like this:

• What is the desired outcome? The outcome desired is 240 new members.
• How long will it take to achieve this outcome? 240 new members in one year would require 20 per month. Six months requires 40 per month.
• How will this outcome benefit your business or your members? With 240 new members, profitability will increase enough to add additional courses or assets for our members.
• Which metric or analytics tool will best measure success? Subscription Metrics
• What actions or changes can you take to impact the outcome? Create targeted ads for the highest represented demographic currently enrolled to increase conversion rate. 

The key is to be realistic. If you’re getting two new subscriptions a month, then onboarding 240 new members in six months may not be realistic. You want to set a KPI that will stretch you without being impossible to achieve.

Once you’ve set your KPIs, use data to track your progress regularly. If you’re not hitting your goals, make adjustments to correct the course. By staying on top of your progress, you’ll be able to tweak your strategy, change direction, or adjust on the fly.

Tracking beyond the analytics

Analytics can feel overwhelming if you focus only on the numbers. Be sure to put those numbers into the context of your entire membership. 

For example, having lots of page visits doesn’t matter if users are dropping off after they read the headline. And acquiring new members doesn’t mean much if your churn rate is too high. 

Analytics boils down to three priorities:

• Setting a growth goal.
• Identifying the metrics that will indicate improvement.
• Then watching those numbers as you experiment with ways of moving the needle.

You don’t have to be a “numbers person” to use analytics. You simply need to understand what each number tells you about your website. Once you’ve done that, you’ll find you’re able to forecast future performance better. You’ll also be able to refine your content and your focus.

This will help you continue to improve your membership, your messaging, and the content and courses you produce. You’ll start attracting your best customers. And you’ll keep them long-term, because they’ll see you as their best source for guidance, news, how-tos, and training. 

Note: Beware of vanity metrics. Some numbers look impressive, but they don’t help you grow your business. To get good results, you need to focus on the metrics that will help you achieve your goals.

Membership admin 

In Kajabi’s membership admin, you’ll find the analytics you need to track your growth and set powerful KPIs.  Just click on Analytics in the sidebar, and you’ll see the analytics tools available to you.

Kajabi also lets you integrate your membership with Google Analytics or other analytics programs, if you want additional data. Together, these platforms will give you the insights you need to achieve your boldest goals.

Other membership platforms should give you analytics as well. But different platforms may focus on different numbers. And some will require some technical know-how to set up.

Most providers will walk you through the steps to do this and no programming experience is necessary. Others may require you to add code to your website to enable the analytics platform to start tracking. 

Getting started with membership analytics in Kajabi

Using Kajabi as your membership platform makes it easy for you to understand how members are interacting with your site and your courses. You can keep track of their progress and use built-in tools like assessments and quizzes to determine how well they're learning and remembering the information you're presenting. 

Kajabi membership analytics are pretty robust on their own. There's no need to deal with cumbersome plugins, clunky extensions, or expensive add-ons. With Kajabi everything works together seamlessly and smoothly. That frees you to concentrate on your members. 

With Kajabi at your fingertips, you’ll have the tools and insights you need to create a membership that truly makes a difference.

Start your 14-day free trial now!

Still researching?

Check out Kajabi’s free downloadable ebook resources.
Attend free Kajabi webinars Monday - Friday to answer your questions about Kajabi's capabilities.
Tune in to the Kajabi podcast, Kajabi Edge to hear interviews with Kajabi Heroes.
Read more blog posts about memberships.