Sensor Tower’s Consumer Intelligence product gives subscribers direct access to Sensor Tower’s proprietary panel of mobile users in order to better understand consumer behavior and changing use patterns on the world’s most popular mobile apps. Cohort Retention looks into this consumer behavior by examining weekly segments of user retention on specific apps.

What is Cohort Retention?

Consumer Intelligence’s Cohort Retention allows you to understand the app’s retention patterns of specific sets of users based on the week they installed the app. Although similar to Usage Intelligence’s Retention metric, the Cohort Retention feature allows you to dive deeper into the retention of users based on the week they installed an app through our N-Week Retention and Change Over Time views.

N-Week Retention

N-Week Retention looks at retention for each segment of users who install the app in a given week. 

For example, looking at the Tinder app within N-Week Retention allows us to look into overall retention across all users of Tinder. N-Week Retention can go even deeper to look into the retention of the users who downloaded the app during a specific week, which you can then compare against the retention of users who downloaded Tinder in a different week. 

(Click on each week to easily compare from one week to another within the graph.)

With N-Week Retention you can compare week to week retention efforts to see how different product changes, competitors, and other factors affect user’s retention over time. You can compare up to 5 app’s weekly retention at a time however look at as many weeks within one graph as needed. 

Change Over Time

Change Over Time looks at the same data as N-Week Retention however focuses more on how that weekly retention changes each week. With Change Over Time you can analyze whether each specific week’s retention increases or decreases as time goes on. 

For example, looking at the Tinder app within Change Over Time, you’ll be able to see how Tinder’s Week 0 retention goes up and down as they make changes to the app. You can then compare against other Week’s retention to see if the changes they are making are having an impact on any other weeks retention.

Cohort Retention Methodology

Cohort Retention Definition

Consumer Intelligence pulls this unfiltered data directly from Sensor Tower’s own proprietary panel of mobile users. We capture raw session data from our users and aggregate it by app to determine how these users might use another app. 

Cohort Retention uses this raw session data to better understand how retention changes among these apps. We define Retention within Cohort Retention as:

The percent of unique users who have at least one active session in a week within the app, ‘X’ weeks after installing said app.

Each Retention graph is also broken down into different segments (weeks), each segment consists of a group of users that have installed the selected app in a given week. This week will always start on a Monday and the data will account for any user who has installed the selected app within the full week from Monday 00:00AM UTC to Sunday 11:59PM UTC.

Cohort Retention Thresholds

• Cohort Retention is only available at a weekly retention rate which means Cohort Retention is capturing the retention of Weekly Active Users or WAU.
• Cohort Retention data goes back until March 30th, 2020.
• Apps are only available in Cohort Retention if we have enough session data from our panel to be confident in the results. This typically occurs for any app with over 100 million downloads.  
• Some small date periods may be missing for some specific apps caused by lack of data for this app. (This typically happens if an app is new as for 10 weeks of data we would need users in our panel to use the app for at least 10 weeks)