Creating a Milestone

What is a milestone?

A milestone defines key behavior of users and accounts within your product. You can use milestones to establish common definitions such as “Active”, “Join Date” and “Churn”. This saves time, avoids confusion, and keeps your team aligned on data definitions.

For example: creating a milestone can solve a situation where one team defines churn as the occurrence of not logging in for a certain period of time, and another team defines it as the deletion of an account.

Once created, milestones can be used in Loops analyses. In Retention Analysis, for example, you can use the “Active” milestone to define the event(s) that lead to a user being retained.

How to create a milestone

1. Log into Loops and click “Data Management” in the left-side navigation bar.
2. Click “Milestones” in the left-side menu.

3. Click the Create Milestone button at the top-right corner of the screen, and a dialog box will appear.

   

4. Enter a name and description for your milestone.
5. Select an entity for the milestone – that is, whether it should include events or properties on the “User” or “Account” level.
   • Note that the list of available events and properties will only include those from relevant views. For example: if you choose “User”, you may be able to create a milestone based on the property “user_join_date”, but not “account_join_date”.
6. Select the milestone you wish to define (note that there can only definition per milestone, per entity):
   • Active – define the event(s) that indicate a user/account was active. Useful for defining KPIs like Retention, Adoption, Weekly Active User (WAU), etc.
   • Join date – define the event property that contains the join date of the user/account. Useful for defining time-bounded KPIs such as Retention and Conversion, as well as filtering new users in certain analyses.
   • Churn – define the event(s) that indicate a user/account has churned. Useful in analyses like Journey Discovery.
   • Error – define the event(s) that indicate an error has occurred in your product. Useful in analyses like Error Analysis, and to explain changes in the health monitoring of a metric.
   • Payment – define the event(s) that indicate user payment, such as a transaction event or subscription renewal.
   • First payment – define the event property that contains the date or timestamp of when a user/account made their first payment.
   • Payment failure – define the event(s) that indicate payment failure within your product. Useful in analyses like Payment Failure.
   • Custom – define the event property that represents a major milestone in your product that you wish to use or monitor.
7. Click Save.

Once the milestone has been successfully created, it will appear under “Milestones” on the Data Management page. From there, you’ll be able to edit, duplicate or delete it.