Glossary

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Glossary: Retention Rate

Retention rate is the percentage of users or customers who continue using a product, app, service, or platform over a specific period of time.

What is Retention Rate?

Retention rate is the percentage of users or customers who continue using a product, app, service, or platform over a specific period of time.

Retention Rate Explained

Retention rate shows how many people keep coming back.

For example, if 100 users sign up this month and 40 are still active next month, the retention rate is 40%.

It is like checking how many students keep attending a club after the first meeting.

A high retention rate usually means users are getting value. A low retention rate may mean people try the product once and leave.

What Retention Rate Means For

Audience	Use Case
Product teams	Measure whether users continue finding value after signup, onboarding, or first use.
Growth teams	Understand whether acquired users return and become long-term active users.
Founders and analysts	Evaluate product health, loyalty, churn risk, and long-term growth quality.

Examples

A SaaS company tracks how many new trial users are still active 30 days after signing up.
A mobile app measures weekly retention by checking how many users return one week after installing the app.
A crypto protocol compares wallet retention after an airdrop to see whether users stayed active after claiming rewards.
A subscription product improves onboarding and sees more users renew after their first month.

FAQs

What does retention rate measure?

Retention rate measures the percentage of users or customers who continue using a product over time.

How is retention rate calculated?

Retention rate is calculated by dividing retained users by starting users, then multiplying by 100.

Why is retention rate important?

It shows whether users keep finding value after they first try or join a product.

What is a good retention rate?

A good retention rate depends on the product, industry, user type, and time period measured.

Is retention rate the opposite of churn rate?

Mostly yes. Retention measures who stays, while churn measures who leaves.

Related Terms

A/B Testing

An experiment that compares two versions of a page, feature, or campaign to see which performs better.

Account Abstraction

Account abstraction is an approach that turns blockchain accounts into programmable smart contract wallets, enabling features like gasless transactions, social recovery, session keys, and paying fees in any token.

Activation Rate

Activation rate is the percentage of new users or wallets that complete a key activation milestone, such as a first transaction, out of all users who signed up or connected within a given period.