# Cohort retention

This report is not ready yet — it is parked in the Coming soon group. It does build a retention grid, but the cohorts are derived from the selected date range and the day boundaries are not evaluated in the property's timezone.

## Why it is still Coming soon

The item is called **Cohort retention** in the side navigation, sits under **Coming soon**, and carries a **Soon** badge. It opens and builds the grid, but three behaviours in the calculation make conclusions drawn from it unsafe:

- **Cohorts are derived from the selected range.** A user's acquisition date is the first day an event of theirs appears *inside that range*. Someone whose real first visit predates the range is assigned to a cohort inside it. The result is an optimistic retention rate on short ranges.
- **Days and weeks close in UTC.** Every finished report buckets time in the property's timezone. This grid does not.
- **Retention is not definable.** Returning means any event at all from that user in that period. You cannot tie it to a purchase or a key event, apply a segment, or export the grid.

## What the page shows if you open it

A selector with **Weekly** and **Daily**, and a card named after that choice — **Retention by acquisition week** or **Retention by acquisition day**. Each row is one cohort: its acquisition date, a **Users** column holding the cohort's starting size, then the period columns, labelled with **W** for weeks or **D** for days, from period zero through period twelve. Each cell is the percentage of that cohort seen again in that period, shaded darker as the percentage rises. Hover a cell for the raw user count. With nothing to show you get **No cohort data in range.**

The grid always shows twelve periods, and period zero is the cohort's own starting size, so it is always one hundred per cent.

## What covers this today

There is no complete replacement yet, but these three answer part of the same question with numbers you can trust:

- **[Explorations](analytics/explore/explorations)** to build the table yourself. Put the date and first-touch channel dimensions next to the user, key-event and key-event-value metrics, and compare consecutive ranges. It is not cohort retention, but it gives you a return trend on your own definition.
- **[Conversion funnel](analytics/reports/funnel)** when the real question is *how many took the next step*, rather than *how many came back*.
- **[Engagement](analytics/reports/engagement)** for returning versus new users and real time on site.

> **Choose a long range**
>
> If you do work with this grid, select a range far longer than the cohort lifetime you care about. The longer the range, the fewer users are misclassified as new. How the range selector behaves is covered in [Date ranges and comparison](analytics/reports/date-ranges-and-comparison).

## Frequently asked questions

### Why does retention look unrealistically good on a short range?

Because each user's acquisition date is the first day they were seen *inside the selected range*. A customer who first arrived months ago counts as a new member of this week's cohort if they come back this week, which inflates the later columns. Pick a longer range to reduce the error.

### What does retention mean here?

That the user produced any event in that period — a single page view is enough. You cannot base retention on a purchase or on a specific key event, and that is one of the reasons the report is not finished.

### Are day boundaries evaluated in my local time?

No. Every other report evaluates its range and its day, week and month buckets in the property's timezone; this grid closes days and weeks in UTC. For an Iran-based property that means a few hours of drift in which cohort a user lands in.

## Related

- [Explorations](https://docs.adpix.io/en/analytics/explore/explorations/)
- [The conversion funnel](https://docs.adpix.io/en/analytics/reports/funnel/)
- [Engagement overview](https://docs.adpix.io/en/analytics/reports/engagement/)
- [Date ranges and comparison](https://docs.adpix.io/en/analytics/reports/date-ranges-and-comparison/)

---

[Docs](https://docs.adpix.io/en/analytics/reports/cohort-retention/) · AdPix