Payment banners: Tracking your impact
Track and optimize your payment banner performance with Recurly's 90-day measurement framework. Learn to analyze click-through rates, revenue saved, and involuntary churn deltas while troubleshooting underperforming dunning campaigns.
Retain • Payment banners
Tracking your impact
Four metrics to track, a 90-day measurement framework, and a troubleshooting guide for underperforming campaigns.
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Tracking your impactFour metrics that matter
Four core metrics tell you whether your program is healthy and where the work still is — the rest is noise.
Banner click-through rate (CTR)
The percentage of subscribers who saw the banner and clicked your CTA. Low CTR is almost always a messaging problem — the copy is too generic or the urgency isn't clear.
Conversion rate
Of the subscribers who clicked through, what percentage successfully updated their billing information? Low conversion rate signals friction after the click — usually a redirect that requires too many steps.
Involuntary churn delta
The change in your involuntary churn rate 90 days before vs. 90 days after banner deployment. This is your primary before-and-after signal — measure it at the 90-day mark, not before.
Revenue saved
Subscribers retained through banner interactions × your average revenue per user. For Engage merchants, the Recovered Revenue dashboard under Analytics → Churn Management → Recovered Revenue calculates this automatically, segmented by "Customer Updates."
Where to find your data
Where you look depends on how you implemented.
Recurly Analytics
Available to all merchants. Navigate to Analytics → Churn Management → Recovered Revenue in your Recurly admin. Covers failed transactions, recovered revenue, and subscriber churn rates — your source for the involuntary churn delta and revenue saved calculations.
All merchantsRecurly Engage dashboard
Each Payment Failure Guide in Pulse shows impression count, CTR, and Conversion Rate out of the box. Check after 24–48 hours to confirm impressions are registering, then review weekly.
Engage merchantsYour custom analytics
If you implemented with webhooks, impression and CTR data lives in your own system. Reconcile those numbers against the Recurly Recovered Revenue report to measure end-to-end impact — your system shows the click, Recurly shows the recovery.
Webhooks merchantsThe 90-day measurement framework
Banner impact doesn't show up in a single week. Card expiry cycles, billing periods, and churn patterns all take time to surface. Here's how to use each phase.
Days 1–30: Setup validation
Confirm banners are firing correctly before measuring performance. Check that impressions are accumulating at a rate consistent with your subscriber volume — zero or very low impressions means something is wrong with your trigger configuration. Verify that resolved subscribers are no longer seeing the banner. This phase is about confirming the implementation is healthy, not drawing conclusions.
Days 31–60: Performance monitoring
Now you have enough data to look at CTR and Conversion Rate with confidence. If CTR is below 10%, revisit your messaging — copy is likely too generic or CTA isn't clear enough. If conversion rate is below 50%, the problem is post-click friction — check your billing update redirect or consider In-Prompt Billing if you're using Engage. This is also the right window to run an A/B test on copy or prompt style before drawing firm conclusions.
Days 61–90: Impact measurement
Pull your involuntary churn rate for this 90-day period and compare it to the same period before banner deployment. Then calculate revenue saved: subscribers who updated billing after a banner interaction × your ARPU. This is a conservative floor — it excludes the silent recoveries handled by Account Updater running in parallel.
When a banner underperforms
Most banner performance problems fall into one of four categories.
Impressions are very low or zero
The trigger isn't firing. For webhooks, check that your server is subscribed to the correct events and your handler is receiving payloads. For Engage, verify the guide is activated and the Failed Payment segment contains subscribers.
Check firstCTR is below 10%
Almost always a messaging problem. Add specificity — reference card last four or renewal date. Sharpen the CTA to a single unambiguous action. Consider switching prompt types: a pop-up creates more urgency for high-stakes scenarios than a bottom banner.
Messaging issueHigh CTR but low conversion
Subscribers are interested but dropping off after the click. Confirm your redirect URL goes directly to the billing update form — not the account overview. If you're using Engage, review whether In-Prompt Billing is available for your setup.
Post-click frictionBanner persists after issue is resolved
The dismiss trigger isn't configured. For webhooks, confirm your implementation listens for charge_invoice.paid or billing_info.updated and clears the flag on receipt. For Engage, verify the guide exit condition is set to resolve automatically.