Retention

Retention shows what share of users who performed a starting action came back and repeated it after some time. It's the main report for understanding whether your product holds onto its audience, or whether users show up once and never return.

The result is usually shown as a table: rows are the date a user first entered the cohort, columns are how many days/weeks later they returned, and cells show the percentage of returning users.

How to set up the report

Setting	Description
Starting event	The action after which a user is considered to have "entered" the report — e.g. "Purchase" or "Bot launch"
Return event	The action that counts as a "return". It can match the starting event (e.g. "came back and opened the bot again") or be different (e.g. starting event is "first purchase", return event is "repeat purchase")
Granularity	The step used for the intervals — day or week
Number of intervals	How many periods to show in the report (default 8)
Breakdown	Splits cohorts by an extra field — e.g. by UTM source, to compare retention between traffic channels

Just like in other reports, you can add a filter to the starting and return events — available fields are described on the Filter Fields page.

How a cohort is formed

This setting lets you fine-tune who counts as having "entered" the cohort on a given day/week:

Option	Logic
Default	A user joins the cohort if, within the chosen interval, they had a starting action matching the filters — even if they'd already done the same action before
First action ever	A user only joins the cohort if it was their very first action of that type, ever — if they'd already done the same action before, they're excluded
Recurring cohort	A user can join several cohorts at once — one for every interval in which they performed the starting action

Example report

Do buyers come back for a repeat purchase

• Starting event: "Purchase"

• Return event: "Purchase"

• Granularity: week

• Number of intervals: 8

• Cohort formation: "Default"

The result shows what percentage of users who bought in a given week made a repeat purchase 1, 2, 3... up to 8 weeks after the first one.

If the starting and return events are the same, the report effectively shows the audience's "survival" — how quickly users stop coming back to the product.