Finding product usage interval and mapping retention type for a meditation app

#productanalytics #amplitude

I came across Amplitude's Mastering Retention Playbook and I have been hooked ever since.
More often than not when we want to increase revenue for our digital products, we concentrate on increasing the number of new customers for our products, but the playbook reminds us there are 2 other groups we should include:

Current users becoming power users (so they spend more)
Dormant users (users who are no longer using the product) rather than focus on our current users and those who were once users.

This article starts from basics; it covers details from Chapter 1 up through to Chapter 3.1. I hope this serves as a practical resource for anyone who picks up the material. At the end of the article, my expectations are you would be able to explain:

Calculate the average number of times a typical user uses your application (performs a transaction on an ecommerce store, plays game, completes a meditation session, comments/like/share for a media mobile app or website)?
How to measure retention in multiple ways for your product.

Here I use a fictional mobile application called Mindful Minutes to explain the terms: *Critical Event, Product Usage Interval and talk about the 3 ways to measure retention

Critical Event

Company	Expected interaction with company's product
Youtube	Watch content
Amazon	Buy products
IC Wealth	Buy Ghanaian stocks
Instagram	Post content, like, comment

The interactions above are called critical events. These are the core actions which the various companies expect the bulk of their customers to undertake. Anything outside these is fine but they may not have a direct and positive relationship with revenue for the company.

Critical Event for Mindful Minutes

We want users to complete a meditation session. Hence that is our critical event. The more users complete this, the more money we make.

Product Usage Interval

This relates to how frequent users interact with the application. There are general expectations for apps: daily (social media, weather apps), weekly (e-commerce [could be daily for some users]), monthly (an application for tax or payroll purposes).
But the fact that your product s categorized under social media does not necessarily mean by default your product usage interval is daily. You need to calculate this for yourself.

Product Usage Interval for Mindful Minutes

From our data, most of our users use the app on a *weekly * basis (not excited to hear this but wait this is why we are reading this playbook to move it to daily)

3 ways of measuring retention

It may surprise you to know that there are multiple ways as mentioned in the Playbook.

N-Day (week/month) Retention:
This type calculates the percentage of users who performed the critical event on a specific day. This measure informs you how many of your users returned on say 3 days after performing the critical event.
Unbounded Retention:
The difference between this and the N-Day retention measure is this value informs you of how many users performed the critical event on the specific day and over. So, if you have 30% Unbounded retention on Day 7, then 30% of users meditated on the 8th day and the days after when they completed their first session.

1-Week Retention vs Weekly Unbounded Retention for the Mindful Minutes app

How to read the graph?

N-Week Retention Curve: 8.64% of users came back on exactly 1 week after their first completed meditation session
Unbounded Retention: 31.96% of users came back after their first week and the weeks there after

Bracket Retention: There are some applications that are used infrequently. As an example: a university build a portal where students can view their transcript. There can be varying arguments that it fits the N-day measure but I think it is infrequent. More students will take a look at it during vacation or when school resumes. So why not group these days/weeks/months and then capture your retention within this period. This explains how bracket retention is calculated.