Why weekly retention looks straightforward?
Weekly retention feels like a safer metric for products with irregular usage. I used to think switching from daily to weekly automatically fixes everything.
Where naive logic fails?
If you check for activity on a specific day, you’ll mark healthy users as churned.
- Some users come once a week
- Some come every ten days
- Some are perfectly active — just not daily
Daily logic applied to weekly products quietly destroys retention.
What GA4 BigQuery requires instead
Retention should be measured by presence within a period, not on a specific date.
Any activity within the week should count.
How I calculate it now
I build weekly cohorts and check for any event in following weeks.
Retention suddenly starts matching real user behavior — and product intuition.
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