A paid subscriber is a subscriber who has paid for at least one invoice associated with their subscription. Subscribers currently in a trial period or in dunning following a trial are excluded.

A low benchmark ranking doesn't necessarily indicate a problem — many businesses have legitimate reasons for lower scores in certain metrics. Your percentile is a comparative measure against peers in your industry, not an absolute judgment.

Things to consider:

• A ranking drop (e.g., from the 85th to the 65th percentile) over time should prompt an analysis of changes in your business relative to your peers.
• Customer demographics — a key driver of benchmark metrics — tend to be stable. For example, serving lower-income consumers often correlates with higher decline rates and lower paid rates.
• Review your dunning settings and their impact on paid rates. Use the Compare Dunning Campaigns and Recovered Revenue dashboards for insight.
• For businesses with fewer than 100 subscribers, significant fluctuations are more common — analyze trends over several months before drawing conclusions.
• Enabling Account Updater for all card types can help improve renewal paid rates and industry percentile.

Benchmarks compare your business against other companies in the same vertical. Recurly's built-in benchmarks draw from over 58 million unique subscribers and 2,200 global brands — including merchants with varying subscriber volumes and order sizes.

Navigate to the Analytics Settings page and request the industry change. Your percentile rankings will update to reflect the new industry. The change takes effect one day after the request.

Historical benchmark values can shift for several reasons:

• Invoices processed after month end — Paid rates are based on invoice creation date, but invoices in dunning continue to be collected after month end, affecting benchmarks retroactively.
• Merchants leaving Recurly — Recurly is required to delete site data when merchants leave, which affects historical benchmark calculations.
• New merchants joining — New merchants entering the platform alter percentile rankings for existing merchants.
• Industry reclassification — Recurly occasionally reclassifies merchants into different industries, which can shift benchmark values.

A renewal invoice is created as part of an ongoing subscription. Key characteristics:

• Excludes the initial sign-up invoice and the first invoice following a trial period.
• Renewal invoices are a subset of recurring invoices — all renewal invoices are recurring, but not all recurring invoices are renewals.
• Not all invoices in a subscription are recurring — credits and subscription change invoices are not recurring.
• This categorization applies consistently across transactions, aligning renewal decline rates (transaction-based) with renewal recovery rates (invoice-based).

Benchmarks use live transaction data only. Sandbox data is excluded from benchmarking. To preview what benchmark data looks like, enable the sample data toggle at the top of the benchmarks page.