Activation
Activation in the Marketing area (Growth) — route /marketing/activation.
Activation lives in the Marketing area of the dashboard, under Growth.
At a glance#
| Dashboard route | /marketing/activation |
| Area | Marketing (marketing) |
| Group | Growth |
| Platforms | Available for every app platform. |
What it does#
Activation lets you define what "activated" means for your product — you choose the event that counts — and then reports the activation rate against it.
The definition is the feature. Everything else here is arithmetic once you have decided which single event separates a user who understood your product from one who signed up and left.
When to use it#
Early, and then as a standing metric. Activation is the highest-leverage number in most products for one reason: it multiplies against every acquisition channel simultaneously. Improving activation by five points improves the return on all your spend at once, which no channel optimisation can do.
It is also the metric that explains a retention problem that looks unfixable. Users who never activated were never going to retain, and no amount of re-engagement messaging changes that.
Workflow#
Choose the event that predicts retention
Not the first thing users do, and not the thing you are proudest of — the thing that, when someone does it, they tend to come back. Find it by comparing retained and churned users' early behaviour in Journeys.
Set it once and leave it
Changing the definition resets your baseline and breaks comparability with everything you measured before.
Measure time-to-activation, not just rate
A product where activation takes four sessions has a different problem from one where it takes four minutes and only 20% get there.
Permissions and prerequisites#
Requires the chosen event to be tracked reliably, and identified users for the rate to describe people rather than devices.
Limits and edge cases#
Activation rate needs a cohort basis to be honest. Rate over all users mixes people who signed up today with people who signed up last year.
A renamed event breaks the definition silently — activation drops to zero and nothing errors.
It measures your instrumentation as much as your product. An activation event that fires unreliably understates activation.
Troubleshooting#
Activation rate is near 100%. The event is too easy. Pick one further into the product.
Activation dropped to zero. The event stopped arriving — check Events before assuming a product regression.
Rate is flat despite onboarding changes. Check time-to-activation; the change may be helping speed rather than proportion.
Where the data comes from#
Served by
Growth