Analytics

What is Retention Rate?

Q: What is Retention Rate?

The percentage of users who return to your product after their first visit within a given time period.

Retention rate measures how many users come back to your product over time. It answers the fundamental question: "After users try our product, do they keep using it?"

Retention is typically measured in time-based intervals: Day 1 retention (users who come back the next day), Day 7 (within a week), and Day 30 (within a month). You can also measure retention against any custom event — like "users who exported a report at least once per week."

High retention is the clearest signal of product-market fit. Improving retention by even a few percentage points has a compounding effect on growth, making it one of the highest-leverage metrics to optimize.

Example

Your Day 7 retention is 35%, meaning 35% of new users come back within a week. After adding an email reminder for incomplete projects, Day 7 retention increases to 42%.

Related Terms

Cohort Analysis

A technique that groups users by shared characteristics or time periods to compare behavior patterns over time.

Churn Rate

The percentage of users or subscribers who stop using your product within a given time period.

DAU/MAU Ratio

The ratio of daily active users to monthly active users, indicating how often users engage with your product.

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