Active users retention

At Zapier, churn means a user used your integration in their Zaps 29 - 56 days ago, but hasn’t run a successful task in one of those Zaps in the past 28 days. This user is considered to have churned from the integration. Maybe they switched to using a competing integration or their workflow had a more periodic or seasonal cadence.

But, it could also mean they got so frustrated with the experience of trying to get their Zap working and keep it working successfully - they turned it off, deleted it, and walked away.

Active users are the percentage of users who haven’t churned.

Key Zapier insights

Lowered active user retention rates don’t necessarily mean poor integration health. Some apps lend themselves to use-cases with shorter lifespans than others. That said, spikes in churn rate not related to seasonal variations in usage could be indicators of a problem with something not functioning as expected.

Active user retention is not a leading indicator. In fact, it’s quite a lagging one that may only start indicating a problem up to 28 days after it has been an issue. That doesn’t deem it useless, we just have to know how to make full use of it.

Best practices

Approaching active user retention with a long-term strategy can help maintain a consistently high level of retention:

• Embed the Zapier experience with copy-and-paste and customizable code within your platform to provide automation value directly to users. Embeds have proven to reduce churn on Partners’ platforms. Learn about embedding options in the guide.
• Share use cases widely during your platform’s onboarding process. Having multiple Zaps using your integration increases stickiness of users not only to the Zapier integration, but also to your platform.
• Update the integration regularly with features as your platform evolves. Invite stakeholders to your integration to give them admin or read-only access to insights, metrics, and feedback to prioritize and align improvements.