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Primary Lift, Retention Drop

HardA/B Testing & Experimentation00:00
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Your question is Primary Lift, Retention Drop. Take a moment with it on the right.

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Problem

Scenario

You work on a digital product where an A/B test shows a clear improvement in the primary conversion metric for the treatment group. However, when you look at longer-term retention cohorts, the treatment appears worse than control. The team is unsure whether this is a real trade-off, noise from a lagging metric, or an analysis mistake.

Question

How would you interpret an experiment where the primary metric improved, but the long-term retention cohort got worse? How would you investigate whether the result is causal and decide whether to ship?

What this tests

  • Balancing a primary metric against guardrail metrics
  • Reasoning about lagging retention outcomes
  • Power and MDE for a lower-frequency retention metric
  • Diagnosing peeking, sample ratio mismatch, and instrumentation issues