Retention

See who comes back after their first visit.

Retention groups people by the day, week or month they first visited, or first completed a goal such as a signup, and shows how many of each group came back in every period after.

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Pick what to measure.

One line at the top of the report sets it up: people who first visited, or first completed a goal, and came back to visit, or to complete a goal.

Who's in a cohort: People who first visited your website, or who first completed a goal. A goal's first time is the first ever, so someone who signed up last year isn't new this week.
What counts as coming back: Any visit, or completing a goal, such as a purchase.
Daily, weekly or monthly: The last 14 days, 8 weeks (from Monday) or 6 months, in the website's timezone. It opens on Weekly.
On, or on or after: On counts people in each period they came back in. On or after also counts them in the periods before their last return.

Read it at a glance.

People: how many are in the cohorts
The share back one period later (Day 1, Week 1 or Month 1) and a few periods later (Day 7, Week 4 or Month 3)
A Came back, all cohorts chart, dashed where periods are still running
A table of every cohort, newest first, where period 0 is the cohort itself and running cells can only go up
An All cohorts row that weighs each cohort by its size

The dashboard's filters apply to each person's first visit, so channel is Organic Search shows how people who first came from search stay.

One person on every device, with identify.

Without more, a person is one browser: a phone and a laptop are two people, and Safari forgets a browser that hasn't visited for 7 days, so later periods read low. Call identify when someone signs in, and every browser identified with the same user_id counts as one person.

window.supr("identify", { user_id: "usr_123" }) once someone signs in
The Identified figure shows the share of people recognised this way
Retention is the only report where identify joins a person's devices; visitor journeys and attribution follow one browser

Set it up.

Put the script in your app too
Retention counts visits to pages with the script. On your marketing site alone, coming back means coming back to the marketing site.
Identify signed-in users
Send a user_id with identify when someone signs in.
Open Retention
Click Retention in a website's sidebar, then pick who's in a cohort, what counts as coming back, and daily, weekly or monthly.

How it works, in detail.

The docs page “Measure retention” goes through it step by step.

How it works

Limits worth knowing

It always covers the last 14 days, 8 weeks or 6 months; the dashboard's date range doesn't apply
A simple report: no saved or behavioural cohorts, and no breakdown by goal properties
Only visits to pages with the script count, so product use needs the script in your app
In cookieless mode nobody is recognised after a day, so there's no retention to measure
Not on public dashboards

Questions, answered.

What is a retention cohort?

A group of people who started in the same day, week or month: by their first visit, or by the first time they completed a goal. The report shows how many of each group came back in each period after.

Can I measure retention from signup?

Yes. Choose people who first completed your signup goal, and count coming back as any visit or as completing another goal, such as a purchase.

Why are later periods low?

Without identify, a person is one browser, and browsers forget visitors; Safari does after 7 days without a visit. Identify signed-in users and every browser with the same user_id is one person.

Can I pick a custom date range?

No. The report covers the last 14 days, 8 weeks or 6 months, depending on whether you pick daily, weekly or monthly.

What's the difference between On and On or after?

On counts people in each period they came back in. On or after also counts them in every earlier period, as people who were still around because they came back later.

Does retention work across all my websites?

Yes. It's in the All websites view too, across your websites.

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