Activation rate

Activation rate is the percentage of new users or accounts that reach a predefined activation milestone within a chosen time window, such as the first 7 or 30 days.

It focuses on whether users actually experience the first meaningful outcome in your product, not just whether they sign up or log in once.

Start by agreeing on a concrete activation event that clearly represents real value, such as “created and shared a dashboard” or “deployed first integration into production.”

Choose a time window that reflects how long it should reasonably take a motivated user to get to that milestone; many teams start with 7, 14, or 30 days and then refine from there.

Compute activation rate as: activated users ÷ new signups in the same cohort window, typically grouped by week or month of signup.

Segment activation rate by acquisition channel, role, plan, and product surface so you can see where your onboarding works well and where it fails.

Skene infers candidate activation milestones from your codebase and maps them to journeys and events, so you can measure activation rate without building custom tracking from scratch.

As you adjust onboarding content or flows, Skene keeps the underlying milestones and dashboards in sync, making it easier to see which changes actually move activation up or down.