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Measure retention

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Getting someone to convert once is only part of the job. Retention shows whether people come back: how many return a day or a week after they were first seen, and how that changes from one group of new visitors to the next.

Open retention

In your app, select Retention. The date range at the top sets which visitors are included: cohorts are built from visitors first seen inside the range. Filters apply here too, so you can compare retention for one campaign, device or accessibility setting against everyone else.

Active visitors

The top of the screen shows:

FigureWhat it shows
DAUUnique visitors in the last 24 hours of the range
WAUUnique visitors in the last 7 days of the range
MAUUnique visitors in the last 30 days of the range
StickinessDAU divided by MAU: how much of your monthly audience uses the app on a given day
New visitorsVisitors in the range who hadn't been seen before it
Returning visitorsVisitors in the range who had been seen before it started

Cohort retention

Choose Daily or Weekly in the toolbar.

The cohort table groups visitors by the day or week they were first seen. Each row is a cohort, with how many Visitors it started with. Each column after that is a day (D0, D1, D2 and so on) or a week (W0, W1, W2) later, and each cell is the share of the cohort that was active again then. Darker cells mean more people came back.

The Average row at the bottom weights each cohort by its size, so it's a fair read across the range.

Reading it

  • Read across a row to see how quickly one cohort drops away.
  • Read down a column to see whether newer cohorts keep more people than older ones. If a column gets lighter after a release, the release may have made people less likely to come back. See releases.
  • Compare segments by adding a filter. If people using large text or a keyboard come back less than people using none, something in the product may be harder for them. See accessibility breakdowns.

If the table says No new visitors in this range, widen the date range.

Cookieless mode and retention

In cookieless mode, the web SDK doesn't store an identifier, so a visitor who comes back on another day counts as new. Returning visitors and multi-day retention only work in standard mode on the web. Mobile SDKs keep an anonymous id in app storage, so retention works in mobile apps either way. See privacy and cookieless mode.