Understanding the Impact of Milestones

For metrics that accumulate incrementally over time toward a specific goal, RetentionX automatically calculates today's expected value to help you quickly understand your performance. Ideally, you would like to see linear growth, adding the same large amount of e.g. revenue each day toward your annual goal. However, this is often unrealistic due to seasonality and the impact of your marketing efforts and budget. Milestones provide a way to reflect fluctuating contributions throughout the year, helping you to better plan and measure your performance trajectory. Let's learn how RetentionX evaluates if you're on track and how milestones affect this calculation.

Example
Let's say you want to reach 150,000 orders in 2024. Without setting milestones, RetentionX assumes a linear progression towards this goal. To calculate the expected value as of today, we first determine the daily targets required to achieve the annual goal. This daily target is then used to derive the cumulative expected value to date.

For example, you want to check in on June 8, 2024 to see how you're pacing. This implies that 159 days of the year have already passed, so we would expect you to have reached 159 x 409.84 = 65.2k orders by today.

Example with a milestone
However, if you know that the second half of the year is typically stronger because of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the Holiday Season, it makes sense to factor that into your expectations. Set milestones that reflect this seasonality. For example, you might only aim for 45,000 orders by the end of June but expect to hit the remaining orders in the second half of the year.

As soon as a milestone is introduced, the expected value on a daily basis is adjusted to reach the milestone first.

Sticking with our example, you want to check in on June 8, 2024 to see how you're doing. As 159 days of the year have already passed, so we would expect you to have reached 159 x 247.25 = 39.3k orders by today.

So, with the milestone in mind, you and your team would be on track:

Not using RetentionX yet?