Prooflytics
Platform5 min read

Recurly Integration for Marketing Analytics: Subscription Revenue and Churn Data in Your Daily Briefing

The Prooflytics Recurly integration pulls MRR, churn rate, trial conversions, and plan upgrade data into your daily AI marketing briefing - so you see which campaigns generate revenue, not just signups.

Recurly subscription billing analytics connected to marketing campaign performance dashboard

Recurly Integration for Marketing Analytics: Subscription Revenue and Churn Data in Your Daily Briefing

The Prooflytics Recurly integration connects your subscription billing data to your paid campaign performance - so the daily AI briefing includes Recurly MRR, churn signals, and trial-to-paid conversion rates alongside your Meta, Google, and LinkedIn spend. Recurly is one of the leading subscription management platforms for media, publishing, and SaaS companies; Prooflytics connects Recurly's revenue data to the marketing spend that drives it.

Recurly handles recurring billing for companies with complex subscription models: multiple plans, add-ons, free trials, usage-based billing, and coupons. The Prooflytics integration uses the Recurly API to pull subscription metrics daily without requiring data exports.

Key takeaways

Recurly Exposes Six MRR Components That Marketing Must Connect to Acquisition Cohorts

The six MRR components - new, expansion, contraction, churned, reactivated, and net - each tell a different story about the health of subscription revenue. Marketing teams need to connect each component to the campaigns that generated each cohort to understand which acquisition sources produce durable revenue.

Net MRR Is the Revenue Metric Marketing Should Be Accountable To Not Gross New MRR

A month where marketing generates strong new MRR but churn exceeds it produces a net-negative outcome that individual cohort metrics cannot reveal without the full Recurly breakdown. Net MRR - new plus expansion minus contraction minus churned - is the number that corresponds to whether the business is growing.

Failed Payment Recovery Rate Directly Affects Accurate MRR Calculation

A 15% failed payment rate with 60% dunning recovery means 6% of gross MRR is in involuntary churn. Marketing teams calculating ROAS based on gross MRR are overstating their numbers by 6%. The recovery rate is not just a billing hygiene metric - it is a measurement accuracy requirement.

Trial-to-Paid Conversion Rate by Cohort Determines Which Campaigns Generated Revenue

A campaign with 150 trial starts at 9% conversion generates $686 per month at $49 per plan. A campaign with 60 trial starts at 40% conversion generates $1,176 per month. The second campaign is 70% more productive by revenue despite 60% fewer trial starts - a budget decision that only Recurly cohort data can surface.

Cancellation Reason Data Is the Highest-Value Qualitative Signal for Marketing Teams

Price objections, missing features, and competitor switches are distinct retention problems requiring distinct marketing responses. Most teams never connect this Recurly signal to their acquisition and creative analysis, leaving the clearest available feedback from churned customers unread.

What data Prooflytics pulls from Recurly

Revenue metrics

  • MRR and its components: new, expansion, contraction, churned, reactivated, net
  • ARR trend over 30 and 90 days
  • ARPU by plan and cohort
  • Revenue by subscription plan and add-on

Subscription and trial data

  • New subscriptions by plan type and source
  • Trial starts and trial-to-paid conversion rate
  • Free-to-paid conversion rate (for freemium models)
  • Failed payment recovery rate - dunning effectiveness

Churn and retention

  • Monthly subscriber churn rate and revenue churn rate
  • Cancellation reason data (when captured via Recurly's exit survey)
  • Subscription pause and plan downgrade rates
  • 90-day cohort retention by acquisition month
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What you can do once Recurly is connected

Measure paid campaigns by MRR contribution. A Meta Ads campaign that drives 300 trial signups and converts 42 to paid at $49/month generated $2,058 MRR in that campaign window. Compare this to a Google Ads campaign with 180 trial signups and 61 paid conversions - $2,989 MRR at likely different spend levels. Prooflytics shows MRR generated per campaign when UTM data is passed to Recurly at subscription creation.

Track churn risk before it becomes churn. The 'FRAMEWORK: CHURN - HOW TO DIAGNOSE AND WHAT'S BEHIND IT' framework identifies five predictive churn signals: declining usage frequency, plan downgrades, increasing support volume, failed payments, and reduced feature adoption. Recurly captures the financial signals (plan downgrades, failed payment patterns), Prooflytics surfaces them in the daily briefing as churn-risk attention signals - before the cancellation request arrives.

Calculate true CAC using Recurly revenue. CAC calculated from ad platform attributed conversions (signups) differs from CAC calculated from Recurly paid subscriptions (actual revenue). The difference is trial conversion rate. If a campaign drives 200 signups at $12 CAC but only 22% convert to paid, the true CAC per paying customer is $54.5 - more than 4× the headline number. Prooflytics shows both numbers and the conversion rate that separates them.

Monitor dunning effectiveness as a retention metric. Failed payment recovery rate (how often Recurly's dunning process recovers a subscription that would otherwise churn) is a retention metric that marketing teams often overlook. Prooflytics surfaces dunning recovery rate in the briefing: if recovery rate drops from 68% to 44%, more subscribers are churning involuntarily - and total churn rate includes both voluntary and involuntary churn, which require different interventions.

Recurly's subscription data is most useful when connected alongside the acquisition channels that generate those subscribers - teams typically connect Meta Ads or Google Ads in Prooflytics to calculate CAC:LTV ratios per channel using actual billing cohorts. Teams running media or SaaS subscriptions who use Recurly alongside Intercom or a CRM will find both connectable in Prooflytics, making it possible to join support cost, acquisition cost, and subscription lifetime into a single customer profitability view. Teams evaluating Recurly against Chargebee or Stripe can connect all three and compare MRR attribution across billing platforms during a migration.

CLTV and subscription cohort analysis with Recurly

The 'FORMULA: CLTV (CUSTOMER LIFETIME VALUE)' framework requires ARPU, margin, and churn rate - all of which are in Recurly. For a Recurly subscriber paying $79/month with 65% margin and 22% annual churn rate: CLTV = $79 × 0.65 × (1/0.22) = $233. If CAC from your acquisition campaigns is $95, LTV:CAC is 2.45:1 - below the 3:1 benchmark for healthy SaaS growth.

Prooflytics calculates LTV:CAC per acquisition cohort using Recurly ARPU and churn data alongside ad spend. When an acquisition campaign cohort's LTV:CAC drops below 2:1, it appears as an attention signal in the daily briefing - giving you time to either improve retention for that cohort or reduce acquisition spend before the economics deteriorate further.

For Recurly users with multiple subscription plans, Prooflytics shows CLTV by plan separately. A customer on your $129/month plan with lower churn may have 3× the CLTV of a customer on your $29/month plan - and a campaign that disproportionately acquires $129 plan subscribers is worth more than its CPL suggests.

How to connect Recurly to Prooflytics

  1. Go to Settings to Data Sources in your Prooflytics dashboard
  2. Find Recurly in the Payments section and click Connect
  3. In Recurly, go to Admin to API Credentials and create a read-only API key
  4. Copy the API key and your Recurly subdomain into Prooflytics
  5. Recurly subscription and revenue data appears in your next morning briefing

Permissions required: read-only API key. Prooflytics uses the Recurly v3 API - ensure you create a v3 API key (the format is a UUID, not the older format starting with a letter).

Most common issue: if MRR shows 0 despite active subscriptions, verify that your Recurly account is using the correct plan currency. Prooflytics reports revenue in your account's base currency. If you have multi-currency subscriptions, revenue is converted to base currency using Recurly's internal exchange rates.

Sync frequency: Recurly data syncs daily at 04:00 UTC.

Bottom line

  • MRR per campaign - subscription revenue from Recurly mapped to the campaigns that generated it
  • Churn signals before cancellation - payment failures, downgrades, and pause patterns flagged daily
  • True CAC vs ad platform CAC - the gap between signups and paid subscribers made visible
  • LTV:CAC by cohort - know whether each acquisition campaign's economics are improving or deteriorating

You can read independent reviews of Prooflytics on G2 and compare it to alternatives in the marketing analytics category.

Connect Recurly at Settings to Data Sources to Recurly or start a 14-day free trial to tie your paid campaigns directly to Recurly subscription revenue.

Frequently asked questions

Does Prooflytics support Recurly's usage-based billing?+

Usage-based billing (metered billing in Recurly) is included in revenue metrics - usage charges are aggregated into MRR alongside base subscription fees. Usage revenue appears in the ARPU and MRR calculations but is flagged separately as variable revenue (distinct from fixed subscription revenue) in the briefing.

How does Prooflytics handle Recurly subscription pauses?+

Paused subscriptions are excluded from active MRR but tracked separately as paused MRR. A rising pause rate is flagged as an attention signal - it often precedes cancellations and indicates customers who are reducing their commitment before leaving.

Can Prooflytics attribute Recurly subscriptions to specific ad campaigns?+

Yes, when UTM data is written to the Recurly subscription's custom_fields at creation time. Your checkout or signup flow needs to capture UTM parameters from the URL and write them to the subscription object in Recurly. Without UTM data in Recurly, Prooflytics attributes revenue at the channel level rather than the campaign level.

Does Prooflytics work with Recurly's coupon data?+

Yes. Coupon usage is included in the briefing - you can see which campaigns drive coupon redemptions, the discount impact on MRR, and whether coupon-acquired subscribers churn at a different rate than full-price subscribers. High churn among coupon cohorts is a signal that price sensitivity drove acquisition rather than product fit.

Prooflytics

Stop stitching platform exports together

Every channel in one brief — plus the memory of what each one actually drove.

14 days free · no credit card

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