What frequency counts as a good number?

There is no reference number that transfers between products, because the natural frequency of an event depends on what it is: reading news is inherently daily while buying an insurance policy is inherently annual. The valid baseline is the trend of that same event in the same product and comparisons between your own segments.

Event Frequency

Intermediate

Updated Jul 11, 2026 Shahin editorial 2 min read

PronunciationEN/ɪˈvɛnt ˈfriːkwənsi/

Event frequency is how many times a user performs a given event within a time range, describing the intensity of a behaviour rather than its reach.

The number divides total event count by the people who performed it at least once, so it is not interchangeable with metrics that count people and should not stand in for them. The main hazard is the average: behaviour distributions in products are strongly skewed, and a few heavy users can lift the mean while most people did the thing once. Reading the median, or the distribution itself, is almost always safer than reading the mean. High frequency is also not automatically good, since repeated internal searches usually mean people are not finding what they came for.

How it is calculated

Event frequency = total event count ÷ number of unique users who performed that event

The denominator is only the users who performed the event at least once, not all active users; switching the denominator to all active users produces a different figure that measures reach rather than intensity. The unit is times per user per range and it moves directly with the length of the range.

How it is calculated

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