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How to measure retention in your community

Retention Analytics gives you deep insight into how many of the new members have you retained in your community.

Analytics displayed here is based on the cohort of new members that have joined your community each week, in the past 6 weeks.

Retention is based on how active the members have been since they joined and there are two metrics you can use to measure retention of these cohorts over the course of given 6 weeks-

  1. The messages that they posted
  2. Their reactions to messages

You can use the above-mentioned metrics individually or you can view them together. Depending on your choice, the data is represented in a graph and a tabular format.

Retention rate by Messages posted

The graph and the table give you a week-on-week overview of the percentage of new members who have posted messages in the community since they joined.

How do I understand this table?

The tabular data is a more detailed representation of the retention analytics. Let’s take a close look at it.

The first column shows the date range over 6 weeks, the second column shows new members that joined each week, and the last column is for the percentage of those members who were active since they joined.

In the example from the above data, we can see that in the 2nd week - from 16th May to 22nd May - 26 members joined the community. 34.62% of the members who joined during this week were active in the first week of joining. 11.54% of them were active in the second week of joining, 19.23% of them were active in the third week, and so on.

You can see that in the 4th week - from 30th May to 5th May - 8 members joined the community but only 1 of them was active in the first week of joining.

Keep in mind that while for the members it was their first week, however, the time span that we’re seeing this data for, this is the 4th week. So, the activity level was 0 in the 5th week and 12.5% again in the 6th week i.e. 2nd and 3rd week of the members joining.

At the top, you can see the overall activity of all new users across 6 weeks. This gives you the cumulative percentage of active members in the community in that week. Given the percentage of active users each week, you can determine what your retention rate was at that time.

Retention rate be Reactions posted

This graph and table give you a week-on-week overview of the percentage of new members who have reacted to messages in the community since they joined.

It’s the same as how you can interpret the previous table. The only difference is that this only takes into account the reactions that were posted by members after they joined.

Retention rate by Messages and Reactions posted

This graph and table give you a week-on-week overview of the percentage of new members who have posted messages and reacted to messages in the community since they joined.

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