Long Term Retention - The Impact of Social Features

If you like metrics and graphs, you'd love this one. It's one of the metrics we use to measure how well we are doing here at eSnips  in maintaining the interest of people who sign up to the site.

What is measured here is the month by month improvement in what is referred to in the industry 'Long Term Retention'.  Long term retention tracks how many of the people that signed up to a particular service during a particular month continue to visit it regularly and actively use it several months later. The 'Industry' number tends to be all over the place depending on how it's measured.

Here is the data for eSnips. What's interesting to see here is the very significant improvement in retention that takes place with time.  Every one of these lines represents a group of users that registered during a particular month. The first line on the left is the group of people that signed up with eSnips during October. Every point on this line represents the percent of those who remained active a month later, two months later, three months later….up to six months later. The next line to the right of it represents users that signed up during November and so on.  What is very evident from this graph is that every month the site becomes more attractive, and every month the % of retention increases drastically. Improving retention is a difficult thing to do, even by single percentage points. We are delighted to have managed to improve by several tens of percentages. This increase in retention is It's clearly linked to new functionality that is added to eSnips every month, making it more appealing for people to return.

Kudos to our team, and thanks eSnippers for your support, contribution, use and appreciation of the feature set!

Comments

[alex]

fascinating. Could you share the metric for deciding if an account is 'active' each month? It seems many retention statistics count a user as active for a particular month if they log in at least once. Do you use this, or a more sophisticated method? Do you think more sophisticated methods give usefully better information?

Also, I'm a long time reader, but I haven't bothered asking before: please stop using a fixed width layout for your blog! Even on my 15" laptop it takes up arely half the screen! :P

[YaelElish]

Alex: this graph is based on the very basic metric you mention: users who log in at least once a month. It really depends what exactly it is that you are trying to learn about your user base. In this case I think this metrics is simple and good enough to convey the progress we are trying to monitor. I'll be happy to hear your thoughts on this and what other methods out there make sense to you. And yes... i'll try chanign the layout right now :) why not.

[Eddy]

B"H G-d bless you Yael Elish and your wonderful company! May you exceed your expectations and be prosperous in your endeavors

- Esnips Eddy

B"H

[soundar]

eSnips is sure good...but its search engine is abominable; try entering multiple keywords, or within quotes, you will know...also one caanot search only pdf's or mp3's or english only...also, page navigation has to be improved (cursor stops at the search box not allowing pageup/pagedn)

[search-twicer]

e snips was really a cool site, i cant imagine ,before searching for a particular file, i thought definitely it wont be available but im really surprised that it is there, i could nt believe i heard my favorite and rare song after a long time thanks to esnips keep on the good work, i might also upload some rare files to share.

[Dan]

This seems wrong. You have to measure each group for at least 6 months and then compare the lines. Obviously March will show a higher retention rate because you're only measuring 1 month ahead. Lets see you post updated graphs now that 6 months have passed since your last observation on March.

[Harvy]

this figure was coz of sharing files, but now it seems esnips hindered downloading files specially mp3...we hope esnips who bring back the status quo of \free sharing without so much mess like they place now.

[sherry]

esnips is really good..but now i dunno why i cant download any song from esnips..is that any problem wit my account?