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New retention chart with user maturity

  • 5 August 2022
  • 4 replies
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Hi,

 

I just came across this article talking about the new segmentation support for the retention charts and also the consideration of user maturity now.

I’m a little bit confused about the last point.

From my understanding, it means that in the retention chart you don’t consider anymore that a user will renew until it has actually renewed, am I correct?

 

When I look at a retention chart without any segment, it seems like you’re still considering that a user will renew unless it cancels its subscription:

Retention chart for the last 90 days
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On the other hand, when I add a segment like country still for the last 90 days, I do only see the retention of the past 2 months, and no projection for the current month.

Retention chart with a segment

 

For me, the data dilemma you’re talking about in your article is occurring no matter if we add a segment or not. Would you have an explanation about these two different behaviors?

 

Thank you,

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Best answer by Dan Pannasch 5 August 2022, 18:50

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Hey, thanks for reaching out! I think I see where I caused some confusion -- let me clarify:

if you’re viewing the last 12 month of new subscribers, some of those subscribers will only be a few months old, and have not had the opportunity to retain for the whole period.

 

I probably could’ve used a better word than “period” to describe this in the article. When I said “whole period” there, I was referring to the “last 12 months”, not necessarily the most recent period/month in the resulting chart. “To retain for the whole timeframe” would’ve been clearer.

In addition, that paragraph is only referring to the new segmentation options, which after rereading the article I don’t think is very clear. It’ll be edited shortly -- thanks for the call out! :)

Now, just to reaffirm the behavior and clear up any confusion there…

From my understanding, it means that in the retention chart you don’t consider anymore that a user will renew until it has actually renewed, am I correct?

 

This is not true, but is a reasonable conclusion for you to have drawn. 😄 Here’s how it works now:

  1. When segmenting by Subscription start month (the default behavior, and the previous behavior of this chart), you are correct that for incomplete periods (marked with hashes) we will still count a subscriber as long as their subscription is set to renew by the end of that period and continue to have auto-renewal enabled.
  2. When segmenting by any other dimension, since the subscriber’s within each cohort of the dimension will have different subscription start dates, we calculate their retention through cohort maturity so that you can compare different cohorts of that dimension cleanly over the life of their subscriptions.
    1. Through this approach you do lose the view into the current, incomplete period for your segmented cohorts, though that’s something we’ll look to support in the future.

If any additional questions remain, feel free to add them and I’ll make sure we get everything squared away. Thanks!

 

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Hi Dan,

 

Thank you for your answer, it’s clearer now.

 

I still have one question, how do we know how many subscriptions have been taken into account to calculate Month 1 rate and the Month 2 rate (cf. my screenshot)?

 

Because to my understanding, it can’t use the number of subscribers displayed, 8428, as some of them didn’t have the chance to renew one or two times since they installed the app during the last 90 days. So is there a way to know on how many subscriptions these numbers are calculated from?

Thank you,

Damien

Userlevel 1
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Yeah unfortunately your understanding is correct that 8,428 would not be the correct denominator to use for periods after the first one. We’ll explore adding that context into the tooltip or in some other form in the future so that you can more easily understand the sample size that each period in the cohort represents.

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Ok, thanks Dan for the answer!

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