Retention Report Basics

The Retention report in Mixpanel is designed to create a normalized, actionable metric to assess user engagement over a specified period of time. Users are broken into buckets based on when they first completed an action, and then subsequent buckets based on when they came back and performed either the same action or a different action. 

Click here to learn more about how to build a Retention report. Click here to learn more about how to interpret a Retention report.

Retention calculations are based on unique users, not total event count. 

You can select either Recurring, First Time, or Frequency from the drop-down list at the top left of the query builder. Each of these reports uses the same methods of calculation but allows you to specify which event and property combination performed is creating the user buckets and measuring your user retention.

Access the Retention Report

To view the Retention report select Retention from the Analysis section of Mixpanel.

Recurring Retention

Recurring Retention allows you to specify a single event and see the retention of users coming back to perform this same event over time. This report tells you how often users come back and perform the same events.

First Time Retention

First Time Retention allows you to specify one event to create the user bucket you are measuring, and another event to measure the retention on. Similar to recurring retention, you also have the option to choose “anything” as the event. This report is useful for tracking users who performed a specific event (such as sign-up), and how often they came back to do some other action on your site.

This report retrieves the first instance of the bucketing event in the defined time range, but it doesn’t take into account whether it’s the first time of all-time a user has done a certain action. For example, if you select “Add payment method” as your bucketing event, the user buckets will include all users who did the event “Add payment method” during the report time frame, not the first time in that user’s lifecycle.

Frequency Retention

Frequency Retention allows you to specify an event and see how often a user performed that same event in the future. Whereas the above retention calculations will return the number of users who performed an event, frequency will actually calculate the number of times each user who came back performed the event. This allows you to see how "active" your users are over the course of a given time period.

Using the frequency report will allow you to see how many hours in a day, days in a week, or days in a month your retained users are performing a specific event. As with the other reports, you also have the option to choose “Anything” to see generally how often users are performing events.

Power User Curve

TheFrequency report shows cumulative numbers in the report by default, but you can choose to select NON-CUMULATIVE from the top of the report chart. Non-cumulative numbers will give you a Power User Curve of your users’ frequency retention over time. For example, a user will count in the 1 hour, 2 hour, 3 hour, 4 hour and 5 hour columns if the user completes an event each hour in a cumulative frequency report broken down by day. With non-cumulative frequency, this user would only count in the 5 hour columns in a frequency report broken down by day.