Feature Adoption Rate
The percentage of eligible active users who have used a specific feature at least once within a given window since it became available to them.
“Are users actually discovering and trying the features we ship?”
Whether a feature is being discovered and tried by the audience it was built for.
Whether the feature is delivering value or being retained — a user can try a feature once and never return to it.
Numerator
Users Who Used Feature at least once in the window
Denominator
Users Eligible for Feature (had access during the window)
Example
12,000 users had access to a new export feature; 2,880 used it within 30 days. Adoption Rate = 2,880 / 12,000 = 24%.
Recommended visualization: Cohort adoption curve (days since feature exposure)
Requires a clearly instrumented 'feature used' event and an accurate 'eligible' population (e.g., feature-flag exposure log), not just all active users — otherwise denominators are inflated.
- Confirm the eligibility denominator excludes users without access (permissions, plan tier, region rollout)
- Deduplicate repeat-use events when counting unique adopters
- Using total user base instead of eligible/exposed users as the denominator, understating true adoption
- Treating one-time trial as adoption without a repeat-usage or retention follow-up metric
Get a conversational, stakeholder-friendly explanation of this KPI, generated on demand.