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MLemanski's avatar
MLemanski
New Member
8 years ago

Purchase Frequency Stratification

Hello,

 

I am trying to solve the following problem in PowerBI.  I am analyzing customer purchase frequency, so I created a dynamic measure that calculates how many unique months a customer purchases an item in over a period of time.  I then divide that by the months that are in that period to come up with a Customer Purchase Frequency.  

 

[Customer Purchase Frequency] = [Unique Months Customer Purchased] / [Months in Selection]

 

This results in a percentage that I can then put into buckets, no matter the length of the period selected.  For example:

 

Purchase FrequencyMinMax
0 - 3 Months75.0%100.0%
3 - 6 Months50.0%75.0%
6 - 12 Months8.3%50.0%
12+ Months0.0%8.3%

 

What I would like to do now is summarize my sales, unique customer count, etc. by my "Purchase Frequency" buckets as defined above.  The issue I am having is that since my "Customer Purchase Frequency" is created from a measure, I can't use it or my buckets based off it as an axis on any charts or tables.

 

I believe the solution has to do with using a disconnected table, formatted like the table above, but I am not sure how to get my sales, customer counts, and other calculations to work with it.  Any direction would be much appreciated.  Also, if there is a simpler solution to this problem, please let me know.

 

Thanks!

2 Replies

  • v-juanli-msft's avatar
    v-juanli-msft
    Community Support
    8 years ago

    Hi MLemanski

    If you want the "Customer Purchase Frequency" to be used in axis, you could create a calculated column with theis formula.

    If you want to get a table using the column from your original table, you could consider the dax function Summarize.

     

     

    Best Regards

    Maggie

     

    • MLemanski's avatar
      MLemanski
      New Member
      8 years ago

      Hi Maggie,

       

      My issue is that the Customer Purchase Frequency is a dynamic calculation.  A customer's purchase frequency may be "0-3 Months" for one category of product, but "6-12 Months" for another category.  When I try using a calculated column, it just gives me an overall frequency, regardless of how I want to filter it.

       

      I have my data in the standard format, with "Sales Data" table connected to a "Customer" table, "Item" table, and "Calendar".

       

      In PowerPivot, my work around was creating a pivot table that listed each customer and calculated their purchase frequency and sales based on which item category slicers I selected.  I then referenced that table using Excel's native CountIfs or SumIfs functions to summarize them into the buckets that I wanted based off the logic in my original post.

       

      I hope this adds some clarity for what I am looking for!