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PayPal is a popular choice for online payment processing. The platform currently serves over 20 million active merchant accounts globally, and is a proven solution trusted by entrepreneurs for over twenty years.
But for SaaS businesses, PayPal lacks the analytics and reporting features they need to support sustainable growth.
This is why PayPal users love Baremetrics, the ultimate business analytics solution that helps SaaS and subscription businesses monitor and understand subscription data.
This article will cover PayPal’s metrics and reporting features, as well as how PayPal data can be better tracked in Baremetrics. If you’re using PayPal, you should definitely be using Baremetrics. Start a free trial today.
PayPal analytics provide limited value for SaaS companies
PayPal offers users the ability to conduct seamless online payments. Its platform offers some analytics features, but they’re limited to basic financial and transactional reporting:
- Monthly financial summary provides you with a line-by-line view of all your transactions. It summarizes all the financial activity that took place during the month, including customer payments, PayPal service fees, business expenses, bank transfers, and others.
- Transaction details reports offer information about the transactions that occurred in your account and details regarding goods’ shipping status.
- Sales Insights offers a high-level visual representation of your business’s sales performance. It tracks your sales, transactions, and average sale price over time.
- Case reports (previously called the Downloadable Dispute Report) provide details of the status of any disputes and chargebacks made against your account.
- Recurring Payments Profile Reports are accessible to merchants or payment processing partners who have already integrated the Recurring Payments Product. It offers detailed information about any subscribed monthly payments that are outstanding.
It’s important to know that PayPal users cannot access important customer details like:
- What products their customers are using
- How long they’ve been a customer
- What subscription plan they’re on
- The terms of those plans, and more.
Growing SaaS businesses need to know this information and keep a pulse on key business metrics to track growth.
Sync with Connex is a SaaS company that used PayPal to process customer payments over 10 years. But due to PayPal’s limited reporting (and lack of plans to develop better reporting features), they decided to migrate their business from PayPal to Stripe. Read how they handled the huge migration of data in their full guide here.
Baremetrics: A smarter tool for PayPal analytics
Data-driven teams who use PayPal choose Baremetrics to track metrics, engage customers, and make data-driven decisions.
The first step is to integrate PayPal with Baremetrics by using the Baremetrics API. Once the integration is complete, teams can monitor 26 metrics, and on top of that use 8 data-boosting features to get the most insights out of their data.
Baremetrics: A Smarter Tool for PayPal Analytics
Get deep insights into MRR, churn, LTV and more to grow your business
Baremetrics: A Solution Designed for SaaS
Let’s dive into some of the key metrics and features that make Baremetrics an invaluable tool for PayPal users.
Key SaaS Metrics
1. Monthly recurring revenue (MRR)
MRR is the amount of revenue you get from your customers on a monthly basis. Tracking and analyzing your MRR gives you a snapshot of the overall health of your business.
2. Annual run rate (ARR)
ARR is your monthly recurring revenue (MRR) annualized. It gives you a sense of how much revenue you can expect to bring in over the period of a year based on your current MRR. While ARR isn’t the most accurate way to predict how much revenue you’ll earn, it’s helpful when contemplating your growth and expansion plans.
3. Average revenue per user (ARPU)
ARPU is the average amount of revenue that you receive from each active customer over the period of a month. It’s important to calculate your ARPU on active customers rather than your total number of users.
Remember, “freemium” users don’t add to your revenue!
4. Churn
Churn is the percentage of customers or the revenue you lose over a certain period. If you struggle to keep your churn under control, it’ll dent your revenues to the point where your business is no longer sustainable.
5. Customer lifetime value (LTV)
LTV is an estimate of the revenue you can expect to make from the average customer before they churn. SaaS companies use LTV to calculate how much they should reasonably invest in acquiring a new customer. Baremetrics allows you to track your LTV over time and analyze the LTV for specific customers.
6. Quick ratio
A quick ratio is a number that gives you insight into how effectively your business is growing, given its current revenue and churn rates. Generally, the higher your quick ratio, the better your chances are at scaling your SaaS business. Here’s an example that demonstrates the value of quick ratios.
Once you start regularly tracking and analyzing these metrics, you’ll benefit from a wealth of new insights about how well your SaaS venture is performing today and the tactics you can adopt to take it to the next level.
For a comprehensive overview of all Baremetrics’ analytics features and other tips and insights, visit our Business Academy.
In addition to metrics, Baremetrics offers 8 powerful features. Designed specifically for growing SaaS businesses, these features help you make sense of your data without number-crunching headaches.
Three especially useful features are Customer Segmentation, Recover, and Cancellation Insights.
Customer Segmentation
Customer Segmentation by Baremetrics is a tool that helps you gain actionable insights about your customers by organizing them into useful segments. These segments are totally customizable and might include attributes like:
- Geography
- B2B or B2C
- Sign-up date
- Subscription plan and more!
These insights allow you to track metrics by segments, and execute more focused marketing, sales, and retainment efforts.
Recover for failed payments
Recover is an all-in-one dunning solution that helps prevent failed payments. It offers customizable forms, automated email campaigns, and in-app reminders that engage your customers while analytics track valuable data.
Recover also calculates how much you’ve recovered total and by month, why payments are failing, recovery amount, and recovery rate.
By using Recover, Baremetrics customer Cancel Timeshare recovered $680 in failed payments in just one month.
Cancellation Insights
Cancellation Insights helps you understand the reasons why customers leave. It also quantifies the impact cancellations have on your business, and clarifies areas for improvement.
The first step is easy: integrate our customizable survey into your cancellation flow to start capturing data.
Then, our analytics does its magic! Within minutes, you’ll be able to visualize the change in cancellation volume over time, and put a dollar amount on each cancellation reason.
Features like Customer Segmentation, Recover, and Cancellation Insights help you retain customers and earn back your hard-earned money. And the best part is, your team doesn’t have to spend countless hours trying to build these tools internally.
Conclusion: Get Better PayPal Analytics with Baremetrics
Integrating Baremetrics with your PayPal account is a developer-friendly process with the Baremetrics API. However, if you’d like support and guidance, the Baremetrics team can assist you in setting up.
Using both PayPal and Stripe? Not a problem! You can integrate both platforms and view all your metrics on one dashboard. Once the integration is completed, you’ll immediately be able to see all your customer information and data sources in one place.
You can try Baremetrics with your PayPal account free for 14 days. After that, our pricing is based on your business’s MRR.
Start your free trial today, or talk to a member of our team if you have any questions!
