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So I’m trying to make sense of Retention reports but something strikes me as odd.

I’ve chosen a starting even and a returning event for my report in the event module.

 

While exploring the data, I noticed that monthly cohorts include users from previous month as well

 

 

While the figure for November 2021 is correct, the figure for December 2021 includes returning users from the previous months as well as new ones. This can be verified by looking at the lifecycle report which shows 307 news users and 57 returning ones (which adds up to 357 in the retention report). Same applies to all the subsequent months. 

 

 

Is there something I’m doing wrong? Clearly my expectation of how the retention report is supposed to work doesn’t match the reality. I need clarification. Thanks everybody!

You are right - and the reason is that the retention report creates a new “starting event” for the same user if they do that event again in another time period (month in your case). This is a common misunderstanding of the retention report.

There are a few things you can do to “fix” it to match your expectation:

  1. if you have access to “historical count”, you can set historical count = 1 as a property on the starting event​​​​​​​
  1. you can choose a starting event that can only happen to each user once (signup?)
  2. you can probably do something with cohorts/user segments

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