The User Retention feature in Cogniss Insights helps app creators track how well their app retains users over time, offering valuable insights into engagement trends essential for optimizing user experience and app effectiveness. User retention measures the percentage of users who continue using an app over a specific period, with a higher retention rate indicating strong engagement as users find ongoing value and return regularly. Monitoring retention helps creators evaluate both app performance and user satisfaction.

What is User Engagement, and Why is it Important?

User engagement shows how often and how much users interact with an app. It reflects their interest in its content and features. High engagement means users find the app valuable while low engagement allows you to highlight opportunities to evaluate and improve your strategy. Some of common metric are User Retention Rate and Churn Rate

User Retention Rate The percentage of users who perform a key performance in the app over a specific period. High retention indicates users find value, while low retention suggests disengagement.

Churn Rate Refers to the user turnover. It is the percentage of users who stop engaging with the app within a certain timeframe. A high churn rate signals that users may not be finding enough value in the app.

How to get User Retention

User retention tracks users who perform a key performance in the app over a specific period

Key performance: This is dependent on your app purpose and your app’s goal. You want to think about what could be the core action for your app. Key performance can be….

Users who open activity more than N times
Users who complete activity more than N times
Users who favorited more than N activities: This data is not yet available in insights, but you can ask the Cogniss team to get those numbers.
Users who visit more than N times: Cogniss doesn’t support login log yet. As a workaround, you can track dashboard entry events to figure out the numbers.
Users who open push notifications (Not yet supported in Cogniss)
Users who spent minimum N mins in total (Not yet supported in Cogniss)

Specific Period: Generally it can be 30 days to 6 months. You can set shorter time period or longer time period (e.g. whole time),

if the period is too short, you will get small data pool
If the period is too long, you might lose the retention as you need to include an old user (e.g. a user who signed up years ago) who might have changed their needs.

How to calculate user retention

The user retention rate calculation determines the percentage of users who performed a specified key performance within a set time frame. Here’s how it’s calculated in your example:

For instance, in the last 6 months, there are 100 new users, and among those 80 users performed a key action (e.g. completed 5 activities). Then the retention rate for last 6 months is 80%

List of Key Performances that Cogniss Insights can support:

Users who open (and not necessarily complete) an activity more than a specified number of times – Indicates recurring engagement with core app content.
Users who complete an activity more than a specified number of times – Reflects user commitment to completing essential tasks or content.

How to get retention rate from Cogniss insights

1. Access User Retention

Navigate to Insights in the Cogniss dashboard.
Select the Analytics menu located on the left tab.
Choose User Retention under Analytics.

2. Setup a User Retention Report

Step1. Select Time Frame

Step 2. Select your Key Performance metrics

Select the primary action that best represents your app’s core value to measure user retention, such as when users Complete an Activity or Open an Activity.
Choose a comparison option—Equal to, Greater than, Greater than or Equal to, Less than, Less than or Equal to, or Not Equal to—and enter the desired number of actions.
After the comparison criteria are defined, click the Run Report button to generate the report.

Understanding the Report Results

Once the report is generated, the results displays a summary of key metrics:

Total number of new users.
Number of users who match the key performance.
Percentage of User Retention: Calculated based on the total users who matched the performance criteria.