Been diving into our analytics and wondering which metric actually tells the better story about where our product is heading.
Retention feels more actionable but churn seems to catch problems faster.
What do you focus on when assessing overall product health?
Both metrics are important but track them at different intervals. Churn captures immediate issues. Day 1 and Day 7 churn rates reveal problems in onboarding or critical bugs. Retention reflects long-term value. Day 30 and Day 90 retention indicate if users find your product worthwhile. I monitor Day 1 churn daily for urgent fixes and review monthly retention to assess if we are creating a product that users want.
Retention is more useful for us. Churn spikes occur but retention data guides our landing page messaging.
I focus on retention because it indicates which users bring value from paid campaigns.
Churn reveals immediate issues but retention helps identify user behaviors that lead to payments. I optimize ad targeting based on user segments with higher 14 day retention rates.
This lets me allocate my budget effectively towards users who are likely to convert.
Really depends on your product stage. Early on, I watched churn like a hawk because we were bleeding users fast and needed to stop the leak before optimizing anything else.
Once we fixed the obvious pain points, retention became way more useful. It helped us spot which features actually kept people around and which acquisition channels brought quality users.
Now I track both but use them differently. Churn spikes tell me something broke. Retention trends show if we’re building something people actually want to stick with.
The key insight for me was realizing they measure different things entirely. Churn is reactive, retention is predictive.
Churn catches fires. Retention shows if you built something decent.