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Retention metrics roundup of articles and links

Just returning briefly from blog vacation to share a couple links and slides I had collected on retention metrics. There’s so little public information out there that I wanted to call out the various articles and presentations that actually do contain real data. Given the difficulty of getting exponentially viral on Facebook these days, most companies are focused on great lifetime value and making it work with big ad buys. Obviously good long-term retention is important for that.

After you calculate out some basic cohort retention analysis, where do you go from there? One key thing is comparing it to existing benchmarks to see if things are going well or badly. Below are some of the few public articles and slides with real data in them.

Here’s a collection of public retention data and discussion

First, from Daniel James of Three Rings:

Metrics for a Brave New Whirled

Also, some slides social analytics company Kontagent:
Twitter retention analysis
RJMetrics, another analytics vendor, did this analysis of Twitter a while back: Twitter Data Analysis. Has some nice graphs like so:

Social gaming data for Facebook apps
And finally, Mixpanel based in San Francisco has some aggregated social gaming data:

Here’s a nice graph from them:

So what to make of all of this?

For now, you’ll have to look through this data yourself. I have a few rough notes I’ve written up about all of this retention data, and time allowing, I’ll publish some of them later. In the meantime, enjoy the presentations and links.

OK, back to blogging vacation :-)

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