Using Mixpanel To Track Retention
What Is Retention?
There are many ways to think about retention. We are going to explore one definition in particular.
Retained users are users who engaged with your application after the initial time period in which they first engaged with your application.
For example, if a user first engages in March and engages again in April they have been retained for one month.
Formula for Retention
A = Active Users (users who did a Core User Action)
B = Active Sign-Ups (users who signed up AND did a Core User Action)
Retention for the time period = (A - B)
I show how to implement this in Mixpanel.
Read on 👉 https://www.jimbool.com/blog/mixpanel-retention/
Cool blog post! Do you have any idea how you would extend this to be able to identify users who are at-risk of canceling?
One way of doing this is to identify users who were active 2 time periods (say 2 weeks) ago but not active in the past time period (in the last week). You can use Cohorts to get at this.
last 2 x time period. 14 days in our case.There you have it. You can adjust the condition as needed. Perhaps you think an at-risk user is someone who did a core user action only 3 times. It depends on your situation.
Thanks, this is super useful. Do you find implementing something like this to be valuable?
The retention information is useful as a general company health metric. In theory, you should be able to use it as a basis for A/B testing though I have never implemented that.
Having a list of at-risk users is useful if you can plan effective interventions. Things like push notifs, personalized emails, freebies, social pressure (your friends did X), etc.