In today’s digital world, we are constantly being bombarded with new products and platforms vying for our attention. As a result, the competition for obtaining and retaining users on digital platforms is fierce. With so many options available, it can be challenging to stand out and convince users to choose your platform over others. Once convinced, it can be even more challenging to retain them for extended sessions and encourage them to consume more content.
As a product manager in charge of building and improving a digital platform, it is important to ensure your platform is attractive enough to maximize this user retention.
Think about it: retaining users means providing them with enough value on your platform that they are likely to continue using it and potentially even recommend it to others. This can lead to increased revenue and customer loyalty, both of which are essential for the long-term growth of your business.
In this article, we explore the objectives and KPIs a product manager should have in mind when prioritizing user retention on their digital platform. We also provide some solutions for meeting these objectives and discuss how the LiveLike engagement suite can help product managers achieve their retention goals. By following the strategies outlined in this article, product managers and business owners alike will be able to turn the challenge of retention into a powerful opportunity for their platforms.
Goals & KPIs For Improving Retention on Your Digital Platform
If you are a product manager in charge of your company’s digital platform, retention should be one of your key success factors. Of course, a lot of strategy goes into meeting and maintaining these retention goals, however once executed, these are some of the most effective ways to measure that success:
RETENTION RATE: The percentage of users who return to your platform over a given time period (e.g. after one month, after three months).
Continuously measuring and keeping track of your retention rate and adjusting your strategies accordingly will ensure your users continue to find value in your platform and feel motivated to return.
FREQUENCY OF USER SESSIONS: The number of times users engage with your platform over a given time period (e.g. daily, weekly).
Increasing the frequency of user sessions helps to ensure users are getting recurrent value from your platform and are motivated to return often.
DURATION OF USER SESSIONS: The amount of time users spend on your platform during each session.
Increasing the duration of user sessions can help to ensure users are getting a deeper and more immersive experience on the platform, which can ultimately help to drive total retention.
NUMBER OF INTERACTIONS PER USER: The number of clicks, page views, and other actions taken by users on the platform.
Increasing the number of interactions taken by users can help to ensure users are engaging with the platform and finding value in it.
CHURN RATES: The percentage of users who stop using the platform over a given time period.
Decreasing the churn rate can help improve retention by reducing the number of users who leave the platform.
CUSTOMER LIFETIME VALUE: The estimated amount of revenue that a user will generate over the course of their time on the platform.
Though not directly related to improving retention rates, measuring the lifetime value of users is a great metric to determine how your platform is generating money. Evaluating lifetime values can help to assess your user retention efforts and adjust these strategies to set your business up for success.
By combining the use of these metrics, you will enable you to precisely evaluate how effectively you are retaining your users and how engaged they are with your platforms.
Tips & Strategies to Improve Retention on Your Digital Platform
Of course, having a valuable and compelling offering within the market, first and foremost, is key for boosting customer retention on a platform. That said, loyal customers and high retention rates are not guaranteed no matter what product or service you provide, especially without an effective strategy for your platform experience. To target the previously mentioned metrics and improve user retention rates on your platform, there are a number of methods and solutions that a product manager can consider:
Personalizing the User Experience can help to increase retention by making the platform feel more relevant and tailored to its individual users. This might involve using zero or first-party data and other technologies to tailor content recommendations or offer personalized incentives and rewards.
AWell-Designed Onboarding Process can help increase retention by making it easy for new users to understand how to use your platform and get the most possible value from it. This might involve using tutorials, tooltips, or other guidance methods to help new users navigate the platform and learn about its features.
Gamifying Your Platform with points, badges or leaderboards can help drive retention by making your platform more rewarding and motivating to use. This might involve offering loyalty programs, discounts, or tangible (real) rewards.
Pushing Interactivity through mini-game modules such as quizzes, polls, sliders, and predictions can drive retention by making the platform more exciting, motivating, and appealing to your end users.
Providing Excellent Customer Support can increase retention by addressing user issues and concerns in a timely and helpful manner. In fact, 89% of companies say that excellent customer service plays a huge role in customer retention. This might involve offering multiple channels for support (e.g. email, chat, phone) and providing prompt, helpful responses to user inquiries.
Continuously Improving a platform can help keep users engaged and motivated to return. This might involve adding new exciting features or functionalities, fixing bugs, or frequently improving the user experience.
How Can LiveLike Help You Achieve This?
At LiveLike, we provide brands and organizations with the tools needed to make their user experience more engaging and interactive, significantly affecting the performance of their platforms. With an extensive suite of interactive tools, informative widgets, live chat capabilities, and loyalty rewards programs, our customizable features empower brands to put their audience first and set their platforms up for success in terms of boosting retention.
Here are just some of the ways LiveLike can help to engage your users and keep them coming back for more:
Personalizing the Experience thanks to zero-party data captured using LiveLike’s interactive features (live chat and reaction analysis, polls, sentiment sliders, etc.)
Gamifying the Experience using the LiveLike loyalty rewards engine (points, badges, leaderboards)
Introducing Social Features with LiveLike chats (public, private, influencer) combined with our two upcoming products (activity feeds and social graphs)
Onboarding Your Customers with the LiveLike Quests feature
When implementing and iterating these features and more with LiveLike, the possibilities for boosting retention on your platform are endless; it’s just a matter of applying the right strategies to meet your objectives.
Get in touch to learn more about improving user retention or to find out how LiveLike can make it possible.
The LiveLike Audience Engagement Suite is a finalist in the region's leading broadcast technology awards, recognising the fan engagement platform's work with sports broadcasters and rights holders
New York, July 31 - LiveLike, the fan engagement platform used by sports broadcasters, streaming services and rights holders worldwide, has been shortlisted for Best in Sports at the BroadcastPro ME Manufacturer Awards 2026 for the LiveLike Audience Engagement Suite.
The awards recognise product innovation, engineering excellence and technology development across the broadcast ecosystem. Finalists were selected across 21 broadcast and satellite categories following industry-wide voting and review by an independent panel of experts. Winners will be announced on Tuesday 6 October 2026 at The Westin Dubai Mina Seyahi Beach Resort & Marina in Dubai, UAE.
The Audience Engagement Suite gives broadcasters and rights holders a way to build interactive experiences directly into their streams and owned platforms - predictions, quizzes, live chat, rewards, loyalty programmes and community hubs - without assembling separate point solutions for each one. Every interaction feeds a single evolving profile of the fan, which the platform then uses to personalise what that fan is offered next.
That combination is the argument LiveLike has been making across the industry this year. Fan engagement has been mischaracterised as a set of features layered onto a broadcast, when the durable value sits underneath: the behavioural graph that every interaction contributes to, and the AI layer operating on top of it. LiveLike's AI layer, Genie, now runs a growing share of the programmes the company operates on behalf of clients, moving the work from manual content management toward automated orchestration.
The Middle East and North Africa is one of the most active regions in the world for this shift. Major tournament rights, rapid growth in sports streaming and rising expectations around second-screen and in-stream interaction have made direct-to-fan engagement a commercial priority for broadcasters across the region rather than an experiment.
"Fan engagement gets treated as a set of features bolted onto a broadcast, and we've never seen it that way," said Miheer Walavalkar, co-founder and CEO of LiveLike. "What we build sits underneath the experience. There are the surfaces fans actually touch, and then there is the profile of that fan which gets sharper every time they touch one. The second part is the part that compounds, and it's the reason a broadcaster can keep getting more out of the platform in year three than they did in year one."
"Being shortlisted in a category assessed by the people who operate live sport in this region carries weight," he added. "They know the difference between something that demos well and something that holds up on a match night."
Sports organisations have spent decades refining three core revenue streams: direct fan spend, media rights, and sponsorship. The playbook is well understood. What is less understood, and far less developed, is the data infrastructure that connects those streams to each other and to the fans who power all of them.
Most organisations know they are sitting on significant amounts of fan data. Ticketing systems, CRM platforms, social channels, digital content interactions: the signals are there. But in the vast majority of cases, that data sits in disconnected silos, producing consulting reports rather than actionable intelligence. The result is a fragmented picture of the fan - one that limits commercial potential across every revenue line.
On a recent episode of Future of Fandom, LiveLike CEO and co-founder Miheer Walavalkar sat down with Aidan Cooney, CEO of Envision Sport Group and co-founder of Opta, to unpack this problem in detail. Cooney has spent 25 years building data and fan intelligence businesses across football, cricket, tennis, and rugby. His perspective on unified fan data, the shift from B2B to B2C thinking, and the convergence of sponsorship and performance marketing offers a practical framework for any organisation trying to move beyond fragmented data toward genuine sports intelligence.
From performance data to fan data: the Opta origin story
Cooney's career started with a simple hypothesis. In the late 1990s, football's status as the world's biggest sport came with surprisingly thin storytelling. Broadcasts offered a scoreline, occasional possession graphics, and goalscorer information. American sports, by contrast, had long used statistics to bring audiences closer to the action.
"If you give fans a higher-resolution understanding of what's happening on the pitch, you bring them closer to the sport they love," Cooney explained. That principle drove the creation of Opta, which transformed how football was analysed, discussed, and consumed. The OptaJoe account became a case study in sports data storytelling, building a following of hundreds of thousands across media, journalism, and the broader sports industry.
But Opta was fundamentally about what happened on the pitch. The return path - how fans reacted to that information and what their behaviour revealed - became the foundation for everything Cooney built next: Ellipse Data, InCrowd, and ultimately Cortex.
The difference between a customer data platform and a fan data platform
One of the most important distinctions Cooney drew in the conversation is the gap between conventional customer data platforms and what a fan data platform actually needs to do. Standard CDPs are designed for rational, price-sensitive purchasers. A fan is something else entirely.
"A fan wants to belong. They're passionate about the player or the team they support. The data that matters to you is very different from a purely rational, transactional data proposition," Cooney said.
The implication is that transactional data - which most sports organisations have invested in through ticketing CRM - is necessary but insufficient. Behavioural data is where the real value sits: how a fan reacts to a particular piece of content, when they react, whether content about a specific player activates more engagement than content about the team as a whole. This is the layer that informs personalisation, shapes content strategy, and ultimately creates trackable, monetizable assets for brand partnerships.
Cooney's platform, Cortex, is designed specifically for this purpose: unifying transactional and behavioural data into a single fan data platform that can activate across channels. LiveLike's engagement and gamification tools then sit on top of that foundation, turning data into community and interaction into measurable value.
The silo problem and why unification comes first
When asked about the most common mistakes sports organisations make with their data, Cooney's answer was immediate: silos.
"Very few organisations have a true single view of their fan base. That is the starting point for everything." Some silos are functional, built by design for specific use cases like ticket sales. Others are structural, created by the relationship between leagues and clubs or by the patchwork of technology vendors an organisation has accumulated over time.
The cost of these silos is not abstract. Without a unified single view, organisations cannot connect their content strategy to their commercial strategy. They cannot attribute sponsorship value to specific fan interactions. They cannot retarget fans who engaged with a poll, a vote, or a piece of branded content. Every disconnected system represents lost compounding value.
Cooney's prescription is direct: "You can't activate until you unify." And the use cases for doing so - from personalised content delivery to integrated brand campaigns - are available now in ways they were not five or even three years ago.
Sponsorship, media, and the hybrid model
One of the most commercially significant ideas in the conversation was Cooney's framing of the convergence between sponsorship and performance marketing. Sponsorship, in its traditional form, has not fundamentally changed since Mark McCormack and Arnold Palmer in the 1960s. It remains an awareness play, hard to attribute, and increasingly constrained as a share of total brand marketing spend.
Performance marketing budgets, by contrast, are growing rapidly. Social media ads, YouTube pre-rolls, programmatic buying: brands are spending heavily on audience acquisition through channels that offer clear attribution. The problem for sports properties is that these two budget pools rarely connect.
"If you create a more diverse set of assets and present them as an integrated media plan, you open up new budget areas within brands," Cooney argued. The opportunity for rights holders is to bridge that gap by combining the premium, trust-based qualities of sponsorship with the attribution model of performance marketing.
In practice, this looks like branded content paired with interactive fan experiences - polls, votes, and predictions that generate first-party data - which can then be used for retargeting and attribution. LiveLike's interactive tools are designed to create exactly these kinds of measurable, brand-integrated fan touchpoints that produce both engagement data and commercial inventory.
AI, personalisation, and the crawl-walk-run path
Both Cooney and Walavalkar addressed the promise and the practical limits of AI-driven fan personalisation. The long-term vision is clear: AI that can serve individual fans with content, offers, and experiences tailored to their specific behaviours and preferences. The economics and infrastructure to do this at true 1-to-1 scale, Walavalkar noted, are still being worked out across every industry.
The pragmatic starting point is cohort-based personalisation. Group fans by location, by behavioural patterns captured in your fan data platform, by engagement tendencies during comebacks or winning streaks. Let cohorts emerge dynamically from the data rather than relying on predefined segments.
"By putting the fan at the centre and serving them at the cohort level, you improve the fan experience, which drives up engagement levels, which drives up the value of the inventory you create on the back of it," Cooney said. "If you then take it to the next level and use AI to super-serve the individual, you drive that engagement and value further."
The compounding logic here is critical. Organisations that delay building cohort-based personalisation while waiting for perfect 1-to-1 capabilities lose years of compounding value - both in fan engagement and in commercial inventory quality.
The B2C shift and why it matters now
Cooney's overarching thesis is that sports organisations are fundamentally B2B businesses today, structured around selling rights to broadcasters and sponsorship packages to brands. The future is B2C: direct, data-informed relationships with fans that create value for both the organisation and its brand partners.
This does not necessarily mean streaming video direct to fans - a path Cooney sees as extremely difficult given the sophistication of existing broadcasters. It means building digital properties that offer genuine value to fans, capturing the behavioural data those interactions generate, and using that data to create a fan balance sheet that reflects the true economic potential of the audience.
"The whole original idea, that the fan base becomes a real balance sheet item, becomes a reality," Cooney said. "And that balance sheet isn't just about the lifetime value of the fan to the sports organisation directly. It's about lifetime value, plus the opportunity for brands to invest in that person over the duration of their fandom."
Listen to the full episode
Hear the full conversation between Aidan Cooney and Miheer Walavalkar on Future of Fandom:
A unified single view of the fan is the prerequisite for every commercial use case in sport, yet most organisations still operate with fragmented data silos.
Fan data platforms differ from standard CDPs because fan behaviour is emotional, making behavioural signals more commercially valuable than transactional data alone.
The convergence of sponsorship and performance marketing opens access to larger brand budgets, but only if rights holders can offer integrated media plans with measurable, interactive assets.
Cohort-based personalisation is the practical starting point for AI-driven fan engagement - delaying it sacrifices years of compounding value in engagement and revenue.
Organisations that treat their fan base as a balance sheet asset - and build the data infrastructure to
LiveLike, the digital fan engagement platform, is powering eight confirmed World Cup activations spanning North America, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, marking the company's largest simultaneous global deployment to date. The activations cover a cross-section of the sports media ecosystem, from major broadcasters and OTT platforms to payment providers and national football associations.
The deployments demonstrate LiveLike's capacity to operate at tournament scale, handling concurrent traffic spikes across time zones as billions of fans follow the world's most-watched sporting event. Activations range from prediction games (Play Predictor+) and loyalty leaderboards to trivia, squad selectors, community features, and gamified rewards programs - reflecting a broader industry shift toward interactive, data-driven engagement as rights holders look to convert passive audiences into identifiable, loyal fans.
Clients include CazeTV in Brazil, where a prediction game with their sponsor iFood is expected to generate record platform traffic, and Minute Media's Sports Illustrated, which is running a full-tournament match predictor covering every stage of the competition on its global digital platform. Additional activations are live with a leading European broadcaster operating a multi-event FanZone with gamification and a rewards shop, and a global payments company deploying wallet-based loyalty and leaderboard campaigns across Latin America.
The FA (Football Association) is using LiveLike to support its World Cup engagement strategy, while one of the largest North American and European sports media groups is using LiveLike’s whole tech stack in various ways across the world (Community, Mini-games, engagement etc…). SBS, Australia's public broadcast service has launched a complete match center experience, combining official World Cup Statistics & engagement widgets.
The scale of deployment reflects a deliberate infrastructure approach. LiveLike's platform is built to absorb the kind of unpredictable, high-volume engagement spikes that define knockout tournament football, where a single goal can trigger millions of simultaneous interactions across dozens of markets.
"The World Cup is the one event where everything has to work everywhere at once. There is no quiet period, no soft launch, no second chance," said Miheer Walavalkar, CEO and Co-Founder of LiveLike. "What we are seeing across these eight activations is proof that our platform does exactly what we built it to do: give every broadcaster, every rights holder, and every platform the tools to turn passive viewers into active fans, at whatever scale the moment demands."
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