Five retention metrics every product team should watch
Acquisition is a leaky bucket without retention. These five metrics tell you whether the product is sticky enough to survive growth.
Kathryn Murphy
Solutions Engineer
Most product teams know their activation rate and their churn rate. Far fewer track the five numbers that explain why users stay — or quietly drift away before ever converting.
The retention stack
- Day-1 retention: Do users come back the day after sign-up?
- Week-4 retention: Are users still active a month in?
- Feature adoption rate: Which features correlate with long-term retention?
- Resurrection rate: How many churned users return — and why?
- Net revenue retention: Does expansion revenue offset churn revenue?
Day-1 retention is the canary
If day-1 retention is below 20%, the activation experience has a fundamental problem. No amount of re-engagement email or push notification will fix a product that failed to demonstrate value on the first session.
"Retention is not a growth metric — it's a product-quality metric. The moment you treat it as a marketing problem, you've already lost."
How to use ASoc to track these
ASoc's cohort builder lets you slice by signup week, acquisition channel, or plan tier and plot any of these five metrics on the same canvas. You can pin the cohort that has the healthiest week-4 retention and work backwards to understand what they did differently in onboarding — then build that into every new user's first session.
Kathryn Murphy
Solutions Engineer at ASoc
Kathryn Murphy works on the data strategy team at ASoc, helping customers turn messy event streams into decision-ready reporting.
