Data Science Asked on December 30, 2021
Whenever I have to communicate a change in a numerical metric, I found myself struggling if I should use Percentage or Percentage Points. Especially, when the metric is a percentage itself, it can be really tricky.
For example, if we track the Retention Rate of users in a platform and the percentage increased from 10% to 30%, we can either say that we had an increase of 20p.p. or we had an increase of 200%.
Another example, if we classify the risk of a business decision to 5% of revenue drop and an alternative choice has 7% revenue drop. We can say 2p.p increase or 40% increase.
Things to consider
Why it matters?
What to do?
How to choose the way I communicate such an increase in the following cases
Use whatever conveys the message more clearly.
This usually means to use percentages only for absolute metrics and use %-points for metrics which are presented as percentages (e.g. "retention rate increased by 5%-points" in your example).
From my experience you can expect almost everybody to know the difference. The only exception would be highly operational staff, e.g. blue collar staff on the shop floor, cashiers in a supermarket etc.
In the latter cases, or if there are language barriers (e.g. audience is not fluent in English) or technical issues (e.g. a bad connection), make the changes explicit. For example:
Answered by Sammy on December 30, 2021
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