---
title: Retention overview
slug: analytics/docs/retention-overview
docTags: 
createdAt: 2026-07-20T15:45:45.582Z
---

The retention template enables the study of the behavioral patterns of actors, such as users, to drive retention and reduce churn. It helps increase product adoption by analyzing the proportion of actors who return to use your product.

Running a retention analysis helps you measure the following:

- Overall retained actors within or at a specific time.
- Retained actors' engagement.

The following screenshot shows a retention analysis for *Weekly Play Retention* to analyze the number of users who played content on the website during their first visit and then returned another time to perform the same action every week. See [Understand a retention analysis](docId:9XTMHm_U42oFmBuTHIU1D) for information.

![opti-ret-1.png](https://api.archbee.com/api/optimize/BrbvVORKJ5iIeSMZye5kI/kTnTXAu1ieHC6nBiMFeWL-20260720-144841.png)

## Prerequisites[​](http://localhost:3000/documentation/docs/Explore%20Data/retention#pre-requisites)

Before you create explorations inside Analytics, you must [create datasets](docId\:ceeHwVegmTgp3ZecBx86k) and [connect them to your data sources](https://support.optimizely.com/hc/en-us/articles/33903147727885-Connect-to-Data-Sources).