User retention

Who, and for how long, sticks to your product

Updated over a week ago

Retention impacts every business metric that you care about.

Here you can find a complete Playbook about user retention: a must-read!

How to define User Retention

User retention it’s the percentage of Active Users at any time after X days of signing up or installing your app.

Ideal frequency

To run a useful retention analysis you need to ask yourself:

What's the ideal frequency at which users should use my product?

You need to figure out what makes the most sense for your business.

Usual answers are: daily, weekly, monthly or yearly.

Once you figure this out you should pick the frequency to read your analysis in an efficient way.

To calculate your user retention you only need two more conditions:

  • an entry condition (usually sign up, app download etc)

  • a returning condition (usually a core action users can perform in your product)

Then it's all about computing the % of users who satisfy the returning condition after having started using the product.

Why User Retention

Retention is the measure of how many users return to your product over time. Arguably it's the most important metric for a SaaS product because it is the way to know that you are delivering value to your customers.

When your business retains its users, your revenue compounds. That's why understanding and prioritizing retention is key for long-term success.

How to use the User Retention template

Once you sign up to June and connect Segment we automatically compute your user retention. To do so we use the first event every user sends as a reference and any other event they performed as the condition for considering them retained.

You can then customize the setup of the report if you wish to focus on more specific actions of your users and/or on a certain audience of users.

Mind that the aggregated retention is a weighted average of the acquisition cohorts.

Go to the report to see your user retention!

Make your colleagues aware of how your product is performing by sending the graph to your Slack channel.


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