Retention

Learn the basics or retention

The Retention report in Mitzu is designed to assess user engagement over a specified period of time. Retention of your users is critical to achieving product-market fit and sustainable long-term growth, and this report will help you understand how long users continue to come back and find value from your product.

Use Cases

Here are some of the sample questions you can answer in Retention:

• On average, how many users are still active after two weeks from signing up?

• What percent of all users are still sending messages after seven days?

• How has my 7 day messaging retention changed over time?

• What is the company's net dollar retention?

Quick Start

Building a Retention report follows the same high-level steps as building any other report. You can read about report-building basics here.

Building a report in Retention takes just a few clicks, and results arrive in seconds. Let's build a simple report together. Continuing the B2C messaging example, imagine you wanted to answer the following question:

Which marketing campaign promotes the best retention after the users' visit in the US?

Step 1. Choose Events

Since we want to know retention after their visit, choose "Page visit" in the first event slot. Then, we want to know if users are returning and spending money on the website, so we choose checkout as the second event.

Overall retention rate Page Visit -> Checkout

Step 2. Choose Breakdown

We want to compare retention rates for each acquisition campaign, so we need to choose the "Acquisition campaign" event property for the breakdown.

Overall retantion rate broken down

We can see that campaigns don't affect retention rates. Although, "Christmas sale" has slightly lower retention.

Step 3. Narrow Down

Now let's narrow down the search only to the United States. For this we need to select the "user country code" in the filter menu and pick "US" as the value.

Filtered overall retetnion rates

We can see that organically arriving users don't retain well on our website.

Step 4. Net Dollar Retention

As a bonus, we can visualize the net-dollar retention. We must choose a custom property aggregation in the Measurements menu for this. We should choose "sum" of "cost_usd". This will sum up all the users' spending retained week by week.

Net Dollar Retention in Mitzu

All Features

Custom Measurements

Custom measurements allow you to look at retention from a different aspect. Most common use cases:

• Net dollar retention

• Retaining companies

You can choose from various aggregation types and the event property by selecting the aggregate property in the measurements.

Net dollar retention example

Net dollar retention chart

Overall vs. Cohort Retention

Cohort retention is helpful to see how product or service usage retention evolves. Imagine a website that evolves as the time progresses. With cohort retention, you can visualize the changes in retention rate over time. Simply choose the "Weekly cohort retention" option instead of "Overall retention."

Weekly cohort net dollar retention

Cohort retentions don't support breakdowns.

Data Sampling

Same as in the case of Funnels, high-frequency events (events that happen multiple times for the same user per minute) do not always provide value during insight generation. However, they increase the query run times. You can choose from multiple data sampling options to reduce the query runtimes.

Retention sampling options

Sample - One User Event Per Minute only counts one event per user per minute. This shouldn't affect overall retention rates, but the query speeds will be significantly improved.

ℹ️The "One User Event Per Minute" option is selected by default.

Custom Holding Constant

Holding a property constant in a retention insight requires that a user retains the same value for a given event property for each step to convert. In other words, a user must perform the retaining events in the order you specified and perform these events with the same property value.

To add a holding property constant to your funnel, expand the "Advanced" menu and click on "Custom holding constant."

Measuring Retention For

There are further customizations for retention calculation. At the moment, we support two main subtypes:

• Returning on specific date - only measure retention for the dates when the retaining event happens. Example: imagine the user performing two page visits. One event is on the first day of the year, and another on the last day of the year. When looking at monthly overall retention, this user will be counted as retained for the last month only.

• Returning on specific date or after - measure retention for the dates when the retaining event happens and afterward. Example: imagine the user performing two page visits. One event is on the first day of the year, and another on the last day of the year. When looking at monthly overall retention, this user will be counted as retained throughout the year (every month).