What is repeat rate?
Repeat rate answers one question: of the people who used your product recently, how many showed up more than once?
If a hundred people used your product in the last 30 days and thirty of them came back for a second visit, your repeat rate is 30%. One visit means you were there. Two or more means you came back.
It is the roughest possible measure of whether people like your product, and for an early-stage product that's exactly why it's useful. It needs almost no data to be meaningful, and it's hard to fool yourself with.
One thing to know: the number depends on how far back you look. Your dashboard has a 7 / 30 / 90-day switch, and repeat rate changes with it. Seven days gives people less time to come back, so it will usually look lower than thirty. That's not your product getting worse. It's a shorter window. When you compare, compare the same window.
Why founders reach for it first
Signups tell you how well your marketing is working. Repeat rate tells you how well your product is working.
Those two can move in opposite directions for months without anyone noticing. That's how a company ends up with an impressive-looking chart of new signups and a business quietly shrinking underneath it.
Repeat rate cuts through that. If people aren't coming back, nothing else you do to get them in the door matters yet. You have a product problem, not a marketing problem. If they are coming back, even in modest numbers, you have something worth putting more traffic into.
What "good" looks like
There's no universal target. A tool people need every day and a tool people need once a month should look completely different, and neither is wrong.
But as a rough gut-check on a 30-day view:
- Under 20%. Something in the first-run experience isn't landing. Buying more traffic now will just widen the leak.
- 20 to 40%. Normal for a product that solves a real problem but hasn't yet become a habit.
- Above 40%. A strong sign you have something worth scaling.
Meterio uses those same numbers when it decides whether to flag your repeat rate in the tips on your dashboard.
Check it weekly, not daily. With small numbers, repeat rate jumps around a lot day to day, and almost all of that movement is noise rather than anything you did.
How to improve it
The most reliable lever is the first few minutes of your product. People who reach the "oh, I get it" moment early come back far more often than people who don't.
Pick the two or three actions you suspect matter most. Look at how many people come back after doing each one. Then make the one with the biggest difference easier and harder to miss.
Meterio shows your repeat rate next to activation and new user counts so you can watch them move together, because in an early product, they usually do.
How is this different from retention?+
Retention follows one group of people who arrived at the same time, and checks back on set days: did the people who first showed up in a given week return on day 1, day 7, day 30? Repeat rate doesn't care when someone first arrived. It just asks whether they showed up more than once in the period you're looking at. It's less precise, and much easier to reason about early on.
Who gets counted?+
Everyone who used your product during the period you've selected, whether they signed up yesterday or a year ago. Someone who used it once is counted, they just don't count as a repeat. People we can't recognise at all, because they never signed in or identified themselves, are left out entirely.
Why does mine show a dash instead of a number?+
Because nobody used your product in the period you've selected, so there's nothing to work out a percentage from. We show a dash rather than 0%, which would suggest everyone left. Try a longer window, or wait for more traffic.
How often should I look at it?+
Once a week is plenty. Below a few hundred users a week, the day-to-day movement is mostly random.