Lifecycle: track the growth of your product's user base

Amplitude's Lifecycle chart gives you a quick, easy-to-understand overview of the growth of your product's user base over time. Lifecycle does this by breaking out your active users into subgroups: new, current, and resurrected (formerly inactive) users. All your total active users fall into one of these categories. The chart also shows a count of your inactive, dormant users.

Much of the power of a lifecycle analysis depends on an understanding of your product's critical event. What's the one thing your users need to do to get value from your product? For a food delivery app, the critical event might be placing an order. For a healthcare app, it might be starting or booking a session. After you identify the critical event, you can build a Lifecycle chart around it and see how your user base interacts with the event over time.

You can also get a bird's-eye view of engagement and retention by building your analysis around any active event. This approach keeps you aware of broad-based trends in your product's usage patterns.

The goal is to grow your current and resurrected user counts, either by keeping users engaged or by giving them a reason to become active again. Watch your dormant users: if this category starts growing, you may have an engagement problem.

Before you begin

Events don't appear in any Amplitude charts until instrumentation is complete, so finish that work first. Refer to the article on building charts in Amplitude.

You'll get more from a lifecycle analysis if you fully understand your product's critical event and its usage frequency. Refer to the blog post on the retention lifecycle framework.

Set up your lifecycle analysis

To build a Lifecycle chart, follow these steps:

1. In the Events Module, select the starting event. Choose a specific event that's instrumented in Amplitude, or tell Amplitude to consider any event as the starting event for this analysis by selecting Any Event from the list of available events.

2. To add properties to your starting event, click + where, select the property name, and specify the property value you want.
3. In the Segmentation Module, identify the user segment you want to include in this analysis. You can import a previously saved segment by clicking Saved Segments and selecting the one you want from the list. Otherwise, Amplitude assumes your analysis targets all users.

4. If you don't want to import a previously saved user segment, you can build your own by adding properties. Click Users next to ..performed by to choose the type of property to segment by (Users, org ID(s), or inventory ID(s)).
5. Click Select property..., choose the property to include, and specify the property value you want.
6. You can narrow your focus further by including only users who have performed certain actions. Click Select event..., then choose the event you want.
7. In the Metrics Module, set your usage interval. If a user fires your selected event within the usage interval, Amplitude considers them current. Otherwise, for the purposes of this analysis, they're considered dormant. Your chart displays the results in the interval you've selected.

This example shows a daily lifecycle chart with an interval of 7 days (August 1 to August 7). Each day includes blue and red buckets defined as active users (blue) versus dormant users (red). Users can't be in more than one bucket per interval.

Read on to learn how to interpret your Lifecycle chart.