Ask HN: How do you track user retention metrics?

1 point·lewiscarson··3 comments

Hey,

I’m looking for a way to track user retention (without a load of hassle) for a side project. How do you guys do it?

I worked as a data scientist for a few big internet companies, and have done a lot of retention analysis (from the ground up). I'd say, it's a hassle for a reason: accuracy. Third party tools seems to give little validation of correct user tracking, and you may have quite different concept of 'a distinct user' and 'retention'. It gets quite deep if you really think about it, both the tracking part and the analysis part. Happy to get into the weeds if you are interested.

Apart from that, I'd also love to hear what hassle free options are out there.

I’m assuming the issues are encapsulated in the idea that you need to specify what events mean a user is engaged and using a product. Is there not a service which you can send user events to (sign in, interaction with a feature) alongside some sort of unique customer ID? Seems fairly straightforward and would result in a fairly good accuracy considering you can track a user over their entire lifespan.

Is there really no plug n play options?

The actual implementation of the retention analysis is not too hard. If you can compute unique customer id, then yes. But how do you get unique id, if say user is not logged in? What if user uses multiple devices? What if user creates new account? The third party solutions I’ve seen (which is fairly limited), is to embed a code into your product, and they take care of the tracking.

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