Understand where you should be investing to bring in new users who end up becoming long-term repeat users.
Step1: Create the inputs needed for this play:
| Name | Description |
| Active Usage | A user action that you use to define an active user when counting daily/weekly/monthly active users (choose “Session” if you define an active user as any visitor) |
| Marketing Channel | A defined property that groups together similar marketing channels (e.g. Email, Display Ads) for a session |
Step 2: Create appropriate Segments
Step 3: Create your Dashboard in Heap
Report Breakdown
Report 1: DAU / MAU
What does it tell you?
This report gives you the ratio of daily to monthly active users. This common KPI indicator can assist in measuring stickiness of your app or site.
How to interpret?
This report will provide insight into how your users are performing over time, while comparing usage and retention indicators. If you are like most sites you are going to have way more monthly users than daily users. However, this can be an indicator of how much value your users are getting from your tool. Are you expecting most users to be active on a daily basis? Having a low ratio of daily active users compared to monthly active users may be standard or expected for you, and therefore normal, but for others it could mean that your product is not resonating with your audience.
Report 2: Retention by Weekly Cohort
What does it tell you?
This report will show you how many of your users continue to return and complete your primary active usage event, broken out by weekly cohorts. It will tell you the frequency in which your users return to complete your desired return event.
How to interpret?
If you see a large dip at the start of your chart, don’t panic! This is normal, especially as users are becoming acquainted with your tool or site. The key here is seeing improvement overtime and to have an upwards trend after any initial fall off.
Add a filter to see if any particular user types or segments are more or less likely to be retained.
Report 3: Repeat Visitors by Referrer
What does it tell you?
This report will tell you where your repeat users are starting their session from. Understanding where repeat users are coming from can help provide direction when determining where to invest resources.
How to interpret?
Are there certain referrers that are performing above the rest? Do you notice more users coming in Direct versus a search engine, or even another company domain? Has there been a spike in any of these? Since this report is looking specifically at high value visitors, it is worth investigating any spikes, or dips, to leverage that referrer to the fullest extent.
Report 4: Session Frequency of Repeat Users
What does it tell you?
This report looks at the number of unique sessions among users who have had multiple sessions per day in a 30 day period. It directly compares user groups based on the number of sessions in a day.
How to interpret?
This report is intended to show you exactly how active your users are by uncovering how frequently they are visiting in a trailing 30 day period. How many sessions occurred by users who visited 2 times in a day versus how many sessions occurred by users who visited 5 times in a day?
Report 5: Session Frequency of Repeat Users by Day
What does it tell you?
Where the previous report identified the number of sessions repeat users had in a 30 day period, this report looks at the number of unique users who have had multiple sessions per day in a 30 day period. It directly compares user counts based on the number of sessions they had in a day.
How to interpret?
Use the table chart to identify the number of users who had 2 sessions in a day, and compare that to the number of users who had 5 sessions in a day; all broken out by day. Do you notice any surprising dips or spikes? Do these numbers align with any product changes or marketing efforts?
Use filters and group bys to identify who these successful users are and run additional analysis. Do they fit into any particular user segments or demographics? What actions are they taking that your less successful users aren’t?
Report 6: Repeat Users by Marketing Channel
What does it tell you?
This report will start to tell you which of your marketing channels is driving the majority of your traffic among repeat users.
How to interpret?
Are there certain channels that are performing above the rest? Do you notice a difference between paid channels and organic channels? Is there any clear winner between email, search or social channels? Was there a spike in any of these?
Before you jump to investing in the channels that are driving the most traffic among your high value users, you’ll also want to look at the impact of your Initial Marketing Channels on conversion rates. Identify any overlap to ensure efforts are focused on channels that drive both high retention and higher conversions.
Taking Action
Understanding if you are retaining users and what drives user retention are big tasks to take on, but are essential for any product team. This dashboard gets you started and can help you identify first and foremost if users are finding value in your product or service by measuring session repeat details. Take the findings from here and do additional research on these high value users. Who are they, are they performing actions non frequent users aren’t performing, are there any user segments that are more or less successful? Understanding who these high value users are will allow you to surface repeatable behaviors that can be encouraged among non frequent visitors. Then, keep measuring! This is an iterative process. Get the data, look for insights, take action, then go back to the data to measure the results of your work!
In Conclusion
It’s common to spend a majority of resources acquiring new customers, but what about retaining the customers you already have? It’s important to find out what makes your high value customers keep coming back, and the first step in doing so is identifying the frequency in which your tool or service is being used. Using data to inform your retention strategy is another important step to ensuring that you grow your business.