Resurrected User
Intermediate PronunciationEN/ˌrɛzəˈrɛktɪd ˈjuːzər/
A resurrected user is someone who becomes active again after a full window of inactivity and re-enters the active user count for that period.
The state rests on a threshold: you have to decide how many periods of silence make a user dormant so that their return counts as a resurrection. It is not the same as a returning user, which only means the session is not their first; resurrection applies only once the dormancy threshold has been crossed. Choosing the threshold requires knowing the product: thirty days of silence means a lost reader for a news site, while annual use is entirely normal for tax filing software. A common error is reading a rise in resurrected users as health; a short threshold inflates resurrections and masks real churn.
FAQ
A returning user is anyone seen before, even if they visited yesterday. A resurrected user is a much narrower subset: only someone absent for the length of the defined threshold who then came back. Treating the two as one makes it impossible to separate the effect of win-back campaigns from ordinary traffic.