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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