Retention

Retention Reports are only available for Growth and Enterprise plans.

Retention in Userpilot helps you measure user engagement over time. By tracking how often users return after completing a key action, you can see whether customers stay engaged, which features deliver long-term value, and where drop-offs occur. Retention analysis reveals product stickiness, adoption trends, and opportunities to strengthen loyalty—helping you drive activation, engagement, and sustainable growth.

Use cases

• Measure ongoing engagement – See how many users remain active after a set time period (e.g., two weeks after signup).
• Track feature stickiness – Monitor what percentage of users continue performing key actions (e.g., continue using key feature after seven days).
• Analyze retention trends – Understand how retention rates (e.g., key feature retention) change over time.
• Uncover behavioral patterns – Identify how frequently users return within specific time windows (e.g., interacting with key feature every day).

Getting Started with Retention Reports

To get started with creating a Retention report, navigate to the Retention page from the navigation bar or through the ‘Create Report’ button within the Saved Reports page.

Building your Retention Report

1. Firstly, choose whether you’d like to analyse the data on a user or company level.

2. Next, define the metrics to include in your report.

   • The Starting Metric specifies the initial action users must perform to be included.

   • The Returning Metric defines the action you want to measure retention against.

     You can choose these metrics from three categories:

     • Events: Based on occurrences of labeled events, tracked events, custom events, or feature tags.
     • Pages: Based on views of your tagged pages
     • Content Engagement: Based on interactions with your Userpilot content.
3. Once you’ve specified your key metrics, specify how you’d like these metrics to be measured:
   • Unique users: count a single entry per user. This will represent the first time a user interacts with the starting event within the specified time period
   • Total count: count multiple entries per user. Users can re-enter the retention report multiple times throughout the selected time period and each time will be accounted for within the data.
4. Filter your data to focus only on the most relevant information. Metrics can be filtered by:
   • Event Properties (for inline filters only)
   • User Properties (for user-level data only)
   • Company Properties
   • Segments

Analyzing your Results

Click ‘Run Query’ and choose the right data presentation options for your needs.

1. Within the header, specify the:

   a. Chart period: choose a time period from the default options (e.g. past 7 days, past 30 days, etc.) or specify a custom date range

   b. Platform: focus on data from all platforms or choose to filter to only web or mobile data

   c. Data point period: specify whether each data point should represent a day, week or month

   d. View of data: choose between a split view or focus solely on the chart or table data

2. Analyze your retention report using the:

   • Retention Trend – A line graph showing the average retention and drop-off rates for users or companies over days, weeks, or months following the starting event. (Example: Regardless of the date a user performs the starting action, if they return to complete the returning action the next day, they are counted as retained in the “Day 1” data point.)

   • Retention Table – A detailed table displaying the exact number of users retained or dropped off for each day, week, or month within the selected time period.

     

Example:

For example, if you run a query with the starting event as “Created Report” and the returning event as “Viewed Report”:

• The highlighted row shows that on October 6th, 15 users created a report.
• Of those 15 users, 66.7% returned to view a report on the same day.
• On the next day (October 7th), 33.3% of the original 15 users returned to view a report, and the pattern continues for subsequent days.

This illustrates how retention measures user engagement over time after the starting action.

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