Retention & cohorts

Does finishing onboarding make users more likely to come back? OnRamp answers this directly: the funnel-split retention view compares week-by-week return rates for users who completed onboarding versus users who dropped off - so you can see in one chart whether your onboarding is doing real work.

Retention answers the question that conversion rate cannot: do users who complete onboarding actually come back?

How it works

OnRamp calculates weekly retention cohorts. Each cohort is a group of users who first appeared in a given week.

For each cohort, OnRamp counts what percentage of those users returned in each subsequent week (week 1, week 2, week 3, etc.).

A healthy product shows high week-1 and week-2 retention. A declining curve that flattens out - even at a low percentage - indicates a retained core audience.

Funnel-split retention

The most actionable view is retention split by funnel completion. This compares:

• Users who completed the primary funnel (reached the last step)
• Users who did not complete the funnel (dropped off before the last step)

If users who complete onboarding retain at a much higher rate, your onboarding is doing real work. If there is no difference, the funnel may need rethinking.

Reading the retention table

The table shows cohorts as rows and weeks as columns. Each cell shows the retention percentage for that cohort at that week offset.

• The diagonal represents the most recently observed data point per cohort.
• Cells further right have had more time to accumulate - they are generally more stable.
• Hover any cell to see the absolute user count alongside the percentage.

Date range

Retention is always calculated from the start of available data for the selected funnel, regardless of the date range picker. This ensures cohorts are complete.