Save, Revisit, Retain: A Scalable Framework for Enhancing User Retention in Large-Scale Recommender Systems

Abstract: User retention is a critical objective for online platforms like Pinterest, as it strengthens user loyalty and drives growth through repeated engagement. A key indicator of retention is revisitation, i.e., when users return to view previously saved content, a behavior often sparked by personalized recommendations and user satisfaction. However, modeling and optimizing revisitation poses significant challenges. One core difficulty is accurate attribution: it is often unclear which specific user actions or content exposures trigger a revisit, since many confounding factors (e.g., content quality, user interface, notifications, or even changing user intent) can influence return behavior. Additionally, the scale and timing of revisitations introduce further complexity; users may revisit content days or even weeks after their initial interaction, requiring the system to maintain and associate extensive historical records across millions of users and sessions. These complexities render existing methods insufficient for robustly capturing and optimizing long-term revisitation. To address these gaps, we introduce a novel, lightweight, and interpretable framework for modeling revisitation behavior and optimizing long-term user retention in Pinterest's search-based recommendation context. By defining a surrogate attribution process that links saves to subsequent revisitations, we reduce noise in the causal relationship between user actions and return visits. Our scalable event aggregation pipeline enables large-scale analysis of user revisitation patterns and enhances the ranking system's ability to surface items with high retention value. Deployed on Pinterest's Related Pins surface to serve 500+ million users, the framework led to a significant lift of 0.1% in active users without additional computational costs.