Experiment Metrics Simplified: Retention, Count Distinct, Max

GrowthBook’s Retention, Count Distinct, and Max metrics simplify experimentation for engineering teams. Measure long-term impact, track unique interactions, and identify peak performance with ease.

· 2 min read
Experiment Metrics Simplified: Retention, Count Distinct, Max

New Metrics to Answer Key Experiment Questions

Data teams face a common challenge: extracting actionable insights from experiments without adding complexity. GrowthBook’s latest metrics — Retention, Count Distinct, and Max — are designed to simplify this process, helping you measure long-term impact, unique user interactions, and peak performance without diving into SQL. Here’s what you need to know.

Retention Metrics: Simplify Long-Term Impact Analysis

Retention metrics measure how many users return or engage with your product within a defined time frame after being exposed to an experiment. Traditionally, this involves juggling SQL queries and timestamp logic, but GrowthBook removes the friction with an easy-to-use interface.

How It Works:

  1. Select your core metric (e.g., user logins).
  2. Specify the time window you want to measure (e.g., 7-14 days post-exposure).

GrowthBook automatically calculates user retention across your experiment variants, helping you understand long-term engagement and whether changes resonate with users over time.

Example Use Case: Track Week 2 retention rates to determine if a new feature encourages users to return between 7-14 days after release.


Count Distinct Metrics: Track Unique Interactions Without SQL

Count Distinct Metrics let you measure the number of unique entities (like users, products, or transactions) influenced by an experiment. Tracking unique entities is crucial because it uncovers patterns of diverse engagement and highlights how specific features drive user actions in meaningful ways. This eliminates manual deduplication and gives you precise data.

Use Cases:

Why It Matters:
Product teams often focus on driving meaningful interactions, not just volume. Count Distinct provides a deeper understanding of engagement diversity, allowing teams to build features that encourage richer user experiences.


Max Metrics: Identify Peak Performance Effortlessly

Max metrics capture the highest value achieved by users during an experiment, offering insights into peak performance behaviors.

Use Cases:

Why It Matters:

Peak metrics highlight the outliers and top-performing scenarios that often drive key business outcomes. They’re invaluable for understanding the upper limits of user behavior.


Designed for Every Team

Retention Metrics are available to Pro and Enterprise customers, perfect for analyzing long-term engagement trends.

Count Distinct and Max Metrics are available across all GrowthBook organizations, making them accessible whether you’re self-hosted or on a free plan.

Why Use These Metrics?

By integrating Retention, Count Distinct, and Max metrics into your workflows, you can:

Ready to Level Up Your Experiments?

Explore these new metrics in GrowthBook today and equip your team to make faster, data-driven decisions. It’s about simplifying the complex while getting results that matter.

Want to give GrowthBook a try?

In under two minutes, GrowthBook can be set up and ready for feature flagging and A/B testing, whether you use our cloud or self-host.