What is repeat rate?
Repeat rate is the share of users who come back to your product at least once after their first session. It's the crudest possible retention number — but for an early-stage product, that's exactly why it's useful. Before you have enough data to model cohorts or compute weekly actives, repeat rate tells you whether anyone is bothering to return.
If a hundred people signed up last month and thirty of them opened the app again in the following weeks, your repeat rate is 30%. That's it. No windowing, no cohorts, no session definitions to argue about.
Why founders reach for it first
Signups measure your marketing. Repeat rate measures your product. The two numbers can move in opposite directions for months without anyone noticing, which is how teams end up with a growing top of funnel and a shrinking business underneath.
Repeat rate cuts through that. If people aren't coming back, nothing else in the funnel matters yet — you have a product problem, not a distribution problem. If they are coming back, even at modest numbers, you have a foundation worth pouring more traffic onto.
What "good" looks like
There is no universal target — a consumer utility used weekly and a B2B tool used daily should look different. But as a rough sanity check for an early product measured over the first month after signup:
- Under 20% is a warning. Something in your first-run experience isn't landing, and buying more traffic will just widen the leak.
- 20 to 40% is normal for products that have found a real need but haven't nailed the habit loop yet.
- Above 40% is a strong signal that you have something worth scaling.
Track the number weekly, not daily. Repeat rate is noisy in small samples and you'll drive yourself mad watching it hour by hour.
How to improve it
The most reliable lever is your onboarding. Users who hit an activation moment in their first session return dramatically more often than users who don't. Instrument the two or three actions you suspect matter most, look at the return rate for users who did each one, and double down on whichever produces the biggest lift.
Meterio surfaces 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 repeat rate different from retention?+
Retention is usually measured per cohort over a specific window (day 7, day 30, etc.). Repeat rate is the simpler, unwindowed version — did this user ever come back at all? It's less precise but far easier to reason about early on.
Should I include the first session?+
No. Repeat rate counts sessions after the first one. Otherwise every signup would trivially count as a return, and the number would just track signups.
What counts as a session?+
For most products, any visit after 30 minutes of inactivity. If your product is used less often than that, widen the window — the exact threshold matters less than picking one and sticking to it.
How often should I check it?+
Weekly is plenty. Daily fluctuations in repeat rate are mostly noise, especially with fewer than a few hundred signups per week.