Definition Of "Anything" In Retention

In all three Retention reports (Recurring, First time, and Addiction) you have the option to select Anything from the events dropdown:

“Anything” includes:

• All of your events, including any that have been hidden.
• “Message Opened” events, generated automatically by Mixpanel when users open certain types of messages.
• “Experiment Started” events, generated automatically by Mixpanel with the A/B test feature.

“Anything” does not include:

• “Message Sent” events or “Message Bounced” events, which are also generated automatically for some message types.

Alternatives to Filtering by “Anything”

Filtering your Retention report by event or people properties is only available once a particular Event has been selected. It’s not available for the "Anything" event option as a means to preserve processing speeds and report reliability.

That said, there are a few other ways to get this data:

1. Instead of using “Anything,” create a custom event to look at a few events you’re interested in and use that custom event in your Retention report. Custom events can be filtered in Retention.
2. If the property you’d like to segment by stays consistent over a user’s lifecycle, consider using a First Time Retention report instead of recurring or addiction. Look at a bucketing event filtered by the property you’d like, then choose “Anything” in the second event dropdown.