Understand your retention by source and how your performance compares to peers.
[Update] October 16, 2025
View Retention by Acquisition Source
You can now view D1, D7, and D30 retention broken down by acquisition source on both your Experience Overview and Retention pages. To see this data on your Retention page, select Source in your Breakdown filter.
Example: Suppose you recently acquired many new users from the Other source (e.g., external links). Using the D1 retention by acquisition source chart below, you can now see that users who joined your game from Other have much lower D1 retention than users who joined from Home Recommendations. This change in traffic mix likely contributed to the decline in your overall D1 retention.
In addition to traffic mix changes, overall retention could also change due to factors like: User reactions to your game updates, seasonality (e.g. holiday vs. school time), and how other games are doing on Roblox.
Reminder:
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How much organic distribution your game gets depends on the engagement of players who discover it organically (players who come through Home Recommendations).
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For Home recommendations, we recommend looking at your Home recommendation signals analytics to better understand what’s happening. Ads or other traffic sources should not affect your home recommendation distribution (we go deeper on this in our FAQs below as this is a common question we hear.)
Select Between Similar Experience and Genre Benchmarks
Benchmarks help you compare your performance against different peer groups, and you can now choose to compare between “similar experience” (other games that your users like to play) and “genre” benchmarks on Experience Overview.
We’ve also updated the benchmark scorecard with more neutral colors and soon we plan to update it to show 7-day averages instead of single-day data to smooth out daily metric fluctuations.
Reminder: Currently, both similar experience and genre benchmarks are for comparison only and don’t impact your home recommendation distribution.
Please see the FAQ below for more details. We’re also happy to answer any questions in the comments. Thank you!
Additional resources
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Got questions and want to learn from the experts? Join our product leaders across Creator, Discovery, and Ads for a webinar on October 21 where the team will share more about these updates, answer common FAQs, and take your questions directly!
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Our “Science of Game Discovery” session from RDC is now live on YouTube. Check it out, including case studies from 99 Nights in the Forest and Ninja Challenge.
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For more information, please read our discovery documentation.
FAQs
I had an experience where I ran ads and my organic impressions declined sometime after. What’s happening?
Click here to view the answer
Running ads should not harm your organic distribution. A decline in organic impressions is an indication that the engagement of players who discover your experience organically is decreasing over time. Running ads can accelerate your game getting considered for organic distribution, but how much organic distribution it gets depends on the behavior signals of players who find it organically (via Home recommendations).
To understand this, it’s helpful to know how our Home Recommendations system works:
- Retrieval: We first retrieve experiences that each user might enjoy from among millions of experiences. You can accelerate your consideration for organic distribution using any source (including ads).
- Ranking: We then rank experiences. How far your game goes, how much organic distribution it gets, depends on the engagement of players who discover it organically (players who come through Home Recommendations).
- Roblox ranks the selected experiences based on 6 key signals of users acquired from Recommended for You. The Home Recommendations dashboard helps you monitor these signals. If your organic distribution is declining, it’s an indication that users acquired organically are enjoying the game less over time. Ads are not meant to fix this trend. Boost organic discovery by focusing on what matters most — engaging gameplay, fresh content, keeping players coming back, evidenced by these signals, and clear, accurate metadata.
Ads can attract new and relevant users to your experience, consistently driving incremental traffic and engagement lift above Home Recommendations. It helps you with the cold start problem of finding your initial users, as well as helping you reach and retain incremental users in an always on capacity.
My game’s impressions from Home recommendations went up, but my key metrics, such as QPTR, playtime, and Robux spend, are fluctuating. What’s happening?
Click here to view the answer
This is totally natural! When distribution increases you will settle into a new baseline. As a result of Home Recommendations surfacing your experience to a wider set of players, some might like your experience a lot, but not all will be super-fans from day one.
- Expect an increase in impressions and plays in the Home recommendation tab of Creator Analytics dashboard.
- As the algorithm explores which players may be best suited for your experience, you may see some fluctuations in QPTR, 7 day playtime, 7 day play days, 7 day Robux spend, 7 day Robux spend days and 7 day intentional co-play days before setting in at a new baseline.
- This is all a result of engagement from users who discover you in the Recommended For You sort only.
