What is retention?
Retention is the share of a starting group — customers, users, or recurring revenue — that you still have at the end of a period. It is the complement of churn: 92% retention and 8% churn are the same fact stated two ways. Teams tend to use retention when they want to talk about the base they kept and churn when they want to talk about the leak.
Retention rate vs. retention curve
A retention rate is one number for one period: of the accounts active on July 1, 90% were still active on July 31. It’s easy to put on a dashboard and easy to misread, because it collapses new and old customers into a single average.
A retention curve tracks one starting group over many periods: of the users who signed up in January, what share were still active in month 1, month 2, month 3, and so on. Curves are far more informative because they show shape. A curve that drops steeply and then flattens means you have a real core of users and a bad onboarding experience. A curve that declines steadily toward zero means nobody sticks, and no amount of acquisition will fix it. You can only see that shape by grouping users into cohorts.
Revenue retention
On the revenue side the same distinction shows up as gross versus net. Gross revenue retention counts only what you kept from the starting base and is capped at 100%. Net revenue retention adds expansion from those same accounts and can exceed 100%, which means the existing base grows on its own. Reporting only NRR is a common way to hide a leaky product behind a few large upgrades, so most teams watch both.
Choosing a definition of “retained”
For subscriptions, “retained” is usually unambiguous: the subscription is still active and paying. For products without a contract, you have to pick an activity definition and stick to it — logged in, completed a core action, placed an order. Different definitions produce wildly different curves, so write yours down next to the metric rather than leaving it implicit in a query.
To build the curves themselves, start with the cohort retention dashboard for the triangle view, or the product retention dashboard for activity-based retention.
Related terms
Put it to work
- Product retention dashboard — Dashboard
- Cohort retention dashboard — Dashboard
- Net revenue retention — Metric
- Gross revenue retention — Metric
