A Comprehensive Guide to Contribution to Change:
Imagine you’re the analyst at a growing tech startup. One Monday morning, the company’s core KPI—Revenue—makes a sudden, unexplained drop. Your dashboards are flashing red, and your inbox is full of panicked messages from product managers, marketers, and executives
demanding answers. You’ve confirmed something is off by using anomaly detection, but now you’re faced with the real challenge.
Understanding the impact of each possible element, the impact of marketing campaigns A/B tests, product releases, performance issues, experiments, population shifts and other factors is crucial and required in order to take action. This is where this white papoer on quantifying Contribution To Change (CTC) comes in.
This paper provides a guided, methodical approach to quantifying how each segment (such as user country, device type, or subscription model) contributes to an observed KPI shift. Once equipped with this formula, you can pinpoint root causes and identify the best explainers of the
anomaly. By the end, you’ll see how CTC fits into the broader Root Cause Analysis (RCA) framework and why it’s a foundational piece of a much bigger puzzle.
Learn about:
- The Root Cause Analysis (RCA) Process
- Quantifying Contribution to Change (CTC)
- The Challenge in CTC
- The Solution
- Calculating Absolute Contribution to Change
- Calculating Percentage Contribution to Change
- CTC Example Calculations
- Alternative Ways to Calculate CTC
- The Problem with CTC
- Next Steps in Explainability
