Revenue analytics glossary
Twenty terms SaaS founders meet when they connect marketing to money, each with a one-sentence definition, the formula, a worked example with numbers, and where ProductLense shows it.
- Bounce rate
- Bounce rate is the share of sessions that viewed exactly one page.
- Churn
- Churn is the revenue or customers lost when subscriptions end, either because the customer cancels (voluntary) or because payment fails and is not recovered (involuntary).
- Cohort analysis
- Cohort analysis groups customers by when they started, or by how they arrived, and tracks each group’s behaviour or revenue over the following months.
- Conversion rate
- Conversion rate is the share of visitors in a period who became paying customers in that period.
- Cookieless analytics
- Cookieless analytics measures visits without storing an identifier on the visitor’s device, usually by hashing request data with a salt that changes every day.
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is ad spend divided by new customers, for the same channel and period. A channel with no new customers has no CAC.
- Customer lifetime value (LTV)
- Customer lifetime value (LTV) is the total net revenue a customer has paid you, averaged across customers.
- First-touch attribution
- First-touch attribution credits a customer’s revenue to the channel, campaign and landing page of their very first recorded visit.
- Gross revenue retention (GRR)
- Gross revenue retention (GRR) is the share of a cohort’s starting revenue still paid in a later month, counting downgrades and churn but not upgrades.
- Last-touch attribution
- Last-touch attribution credits a customer’s revenue to the channel of the final visit before they paid.
- Merchant of record (MoR)
- A merchant of record is a company that legally sells your product to your customer, collecting payment and handling sales tax, VAT and invoicing, then paying you the rest.
- Monthly recurring revenue (MRR)
- Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is the sum, over active non-trial subscriptions, of each period price normalised to a month.
- Net revenue retention (NRR)
- Net revenue retention (NRR) is the revenue a group of customers pays you in a later month as a percentage of what the same group paid in their first month, including upgrades.
- Payback period
- Payback period is the number of months a new customer needs to pay you before their net revenue covers what it cost to acquire them.
- Processor fees
- Processor fees are what a payment processor or merchant of record keeps from each payment before paying you.
- Profit per channel
- Profit per channel is revenue minus fees minus ad spend, for the payments attributed to one acquisition channel in a period.
- Refund rate
- Refund rate is refunded revenue as a share of gross revenue charged in the same period.
- Return on ad spend (ROAS)
- Return on ad spend (ROAS) is revenue divided by ad spend, for the same channel and period. Revenue is charges minus refunds, before processor fees.
- Revenue attribution
- Revenue attribution links each payment to the marketing channel, campaign or page that brought the paying customer.
- UTM parameters
- UTM parameters are query string tags such as utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign added to links so analytics tools can tell where a visit came from.
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