Activation Rate

Activation rate is the percentage of new signups or installs who reach a defined "aha moment" — the first point where they experience the product's core value.

Choosing the right activation event is most of the work here, and it's genuinely company-specific — famously, Facebook's early growth team identified "7 friends in 10 days" as the activation threshold that predicted long-term retention, a completely non-obvious number that only emerged from actually analyzing which early behaviors correlated with staying active. A poorly chosen activation event (something too easy, like "opened the app once") gives a flattering but meaningless activation rate.

Activation is the step between acquisition and retention in the AARRR framework — it's frequently the highest-leverage, most fixable part of the funnel, since it's entirely within a product team's control, unlike acquisition (dependent on external channels) or long-term retention (dependent on sustained product value).