Just found out our customer churn rate was actually 8% higher than our dashboard showed

I was digging through raw SQL queries last night and realized our analytics tool was filtering out canceled trials as 'not churned'. The real number was 23% not 15%. Has anyone else caught their reporting tools hiding bad data?

3 comments

3 Comments

cooper.drew13d ago

...and that's the thing, it's like those old school gas gauges that lie to you on purpose. They show you a quarter tank when you're actually on fumes, just to make you feel better. Same with those grocery store scales that don't zero out right, you think you're getting a fair deal but you're paying for extra weight you don't even have. It's all the same pattern, someone builds a tool to make things look clean and simple, but it's really just hiding the mess underneath.

claire87214d ago

Check if your SQL joins are silently dropping rows you think are there.

sage_moore3713d ago

Strong disagree on this one. Sometimes those "silently dropped" rows are actually noise you should be filtering out anyway. If your users table has 500 orphaned records with no orders ever, why would you want them cluttering up your join results? Inner joins exist for a reason, they protect you from bad data. The real issue is people not understanding their own data model and blaming the join when it's actually doing exactly what they asked.