Your activation metric is probably measuring signup friction
Most activation definitions capture how hard it was to get through onboarding, not whether the product landed. Here is how to tell the two apart.
Journal
Notes on measuring things.
Field notes from the people building Ether. Measurement models, retention reading, automation practice and the pipes underneath.
Written by the people doing the work
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Worth starting with.
No entries in that category yet.
Metric library
Definitions worth stealing.
Opinionated starting definitions. Copy them into your workspace and argue from there. They come from the same three people who write here, and who are introduced on the about page.
- Activation
- The first product action that separates 90-day retention by 15 points or more.
- Net revenue retention
- Expansion minus contraction and churn, over a fixed cohort, trailing 12 months.
- Time to first value
- Signup to the first action a second person in the account benefits from.
- Gross churn
- Revenue lost from cancellations and downgrades, excluding involuntary failures.
- Signal to noise
- Alerts that led to an action, over alerts fired. Below 0.3 means retune.
Each of these is a real metric type in the product. See how they are defined.