WooCommerce: Subscription Cohorts Report

The subscription cohorts report gives you a better understanding of how your subscribers are retained over time. Similarly, it provides a visualisation into your churn for each cohort of subscribers who joined during a given period, with the option to look at each cohort at the weekly, monthly, or yearly level.

It can help you answer questions such as:

• How long after subscribing is a customer likely to churn? 

• When customers reach a certain point in their subscription (eg. annual renewal), are they likely to churn?

• When does churn stabilize for new subscriptions?

The % shown for each month indicates the amount of MRR (monthly recurring revenue) retained from the original start amount. So if the start value was $600 (MRR) and Month 6 said 50%, that means you've retained $300 of MRR by the 6th month.

Additionally, you can hover over a cell to see the numbers behind it:

With the above example, it would indicate that 50.9% (£3,425) of the cohort's start MRR (£6,731) remains. In the focused cell's period (May 2022), £406 of MRR ended.

Weight Average

At the bottom of the report, you'll find the weighted average retention rate for each month:

So using these numbers, we can determine that on average after 4 months, 72.8% of customers are retained (27.2% churned).

Report Settings

There are 3 different periods that you can look at for each cohort, by week, month, or year that the subscription started.

You are also able to switch from MRR to Subscribers, to see retention based off subscriber numbers.

You can also change it so instead of showing the % of the total start amount retained, it shows the % of the previous month retained, or the value itself retained:

These settings will be remembered even if you leave the report and come back to it.

Started and ended in the same month

If you are grouping the cohorts by month, then by default, this report does not include subscriptions that started and ended in the same month. This is to keep things consistent with other subscription reports in Metorik, and to ensure no trial/failed subscriptions impact the report.

However, there's a toggle you can click at the top of the report to include these subscriptions:

When enabled, the first month for each cohort will actually be the start month.

So if we look at the December 2021 cohort, the first month's stats are the retention for December 2021. In the above screenshot, we can see that £387 of MRR churned within the first month.

Behind the scenes, Metorik is only including subscriptions that have at least a successful parent order (first order of the subscription), or at least 1 successful renewal. This is to prevent subscriptions that never actually started (so they ended in the start month) from being included in the cohorts.

Keep in mind

• By default when the report is set to group by month, subscriptions that 'ended' in the same month (or somehow earlier) as they started are ignored. This can be changed using the toggle/setting explained above.

• We only show churn stats up to the current week, month or year. So if a subscription is set to the end in a future week, month or year, that future week, month or year won't show in the report.

• The 'end date' is:

  • The date the subscription ended (or is set to end).

  • If you consider on-hold subscriptions as churned (in the report settings here), we will try to use the date it went on hold as the 'end date'.