There was a time was when number of hits and number of page views were the king of website metrics. Today we have a new metric to focus our energy on: retention. I remember I created my twitter account in 2011, but it was 2014 when I wrote my first tweet (3 years of onboarding??) Question like how engaged are our users? Have they onboarded successfully? How often do they visit back? Are they really involved in our design, or did they give up on it?

Here is a breakdown of the some of the important user retention metrics designers and PMs should use for measuring user experience.

DAU (Daily Active Users):

Reflects what percentage of your user base comes back each day. This is a key engagement metric because it signals high engagement and retention, as it only includes registered users who visit each day (thus they are returning visitors). This is one of the key metrics used by social apps.

HTTP Requests:

Load times are extremely important to monitor as they directly impact how your users perceive your service and that will influence their decision whether or not to become customers. Based on the number of your separate HTTP requests and their response time, the load time for your web app can be influenced dramatically.

Registered Users:

Registered users is a significant metric because it includes only those people who took some step to become a user in the system. This means they made some decision to create an account, which immediately separates them from those who merely visit.

Task Success Rate:

Task Success Rate is Usability metric to read users’ behaviors, telling you what they actually do on your website, as well as how easy it was for them to accomplish what they were set to do. How quickly do they get the dopamine hit. How effectively you did their journey mapping. This is quite common category of success metrics that product teams are already tracking. It’s recommended to select metrics that measure effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction.

Frequency and Time on Site:

Frequency is calculated by dividing the total number of visits by the total number of unique visitors. Time on site reflects how much time people spend using your application. All else being equal, the more time they spend, the more engaged they are.

Hits, Page Views and Visits, of course:

These three metrics were the backbone of web analytics for many years, and some antiquated advertising platforms still rely on them as a metric for engagement. They gives you a sense of the overall volume of traffic on you application.

Having stating these, for each design project, the core actions and metrics are different. However, your core engagement metrics will probably include some combination from the above list or any new metric which involves API requests, the backend server platform as you’ll constantly need to know if you have enough engaged people to keep you in business.