Introduction
Month-over-month (MoM) analysis shows how a given variable increases or decreases from one month to the next. For example, a 2% MoM Revenue growth would imply that the current month’s revenue increased by 2% when compared to the previous month revenue.
Visually, such data would be presented as shown below.
(Which shows the daily revenue, over the two months –> i.e., current month revenue against the previous month revenue)
The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t quantify the change over the period you’re comparing - and therefore in this article I will be sharing different ways to compute MoM analysis in Tableau.
A quick way – using table calculation ‘percent difference’
One of the quickest and easiest way to compute month-over-month analysis is using the table calculation percent difference.
To do that - first create a table showing the values (in this case revenue) by month.
Add a quick table calculation percent difference.
Resulting to…
(Which compares the revenue generated from one month to the next – and that’s why you can see January returns nothing since there is no previous month to compare with. From this analysis, you can see February recorded a 252.6% growth in revenue when compared to January).
2ND way to compute MoM analysis
The other way to compute month-over-month analysis is by using the following calculation – which is essentially the same computation above - but in this case in formula form.
(This calculation computes the monthly revenue – then subtracts the revenue value of the previous month before dividing the results with the previous month revenue –> hence computing the percent change in revenue from one month to the next)
3rd way to compute MoM analysis
The other way you can compute month-over-month analysis is by using month-to-date (MTD) values and previous month-to-date (PMTD) values as shown below.
MoM Analysis = ((MTD Value – PMTD Value)/PMTD Value) *100
Note: The challenge with this approach is that it locks the computation on a single section of the timeline (i.e., current month against the previous month based on the current date), unless you use a parameter to enable dynamic selection of the month you would like to evaluate.
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