Analyzing User Retention: 60-Day Lookback vs. 30-Day Activity

on a retention chart for the past 30 days that shows how many useres signed up in the past 30 days and did anything in the next 30 days - shouldnt I look in the past 60 days actually and offset those with 30 days in order to allow the users to do anything?

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kapa.ai
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Hi Bogdan G., Please stand by as I search the Mixpanel knowledge base for an AI-powered answer. I normally take about 15 seconds or so. In case AI cannot answer your question, feel free to reach out to Mixpanel support at mixpanel.com/get-support. If you have follow-up questions for this thread, please tag me again with your question: @kapa.ai <follow-up question> 👋
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kapa.ai
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You're asking an insightful question about how to properly set up a retention chart in Mixpanel. To answer this accurately, we need to consider how Mixpanel handles retention calculations and date ranges.According to the Mixpanel documentation on Date Range, when you select a date range like "Last 30 days", Mixpanel includes "the last complete 30 days, plus any results from the current incomplete day." However, for retention analysis, you're correct in thinking that you need to account for both the initial action (signing up) and the subsequent period where you're measuring retention (the next 30 days).Mixpanel's retention report is designed to handle this automatically. When you set up a retention report for the past 30 days, Mixpanel will: 1. Look at users who signed up in the past 30 days (the cohort) 2. Automatically extend the analysis period to allow for the full retention period you specifyThis means you don't actually need to manually set a 60-day range. Mixpanel will automatically include the necessary data to show you the full 30-day retention for users who signed up in the last 30 days.If you want to be absolutely certain, you can use the custom date range option. As described in the Mixpanel documentation on Custom Retention Brackets, you can set up custom time intervals for your retention analysis.To summarize, while your intuition about needing a longer time frame is correct, Mixpanel's retention report is designed to handle this automatically. You should be able to get accurate 30-day retention data for users who signed up in the last 30 days without manually adjusting the date range to 60 days.
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