Cohort Analysis
Which group are you in?
What is it?
Cohort analysis is a subset of behaviour analytics which studies the difference in behaviour between different groups of people (customers / users), aka cohorts.
Instead of treating all users as part of one population, cohort analysis is segmenting the population in cohorts which share a common characteristic and then search for patterns in their behaviours.
The discriminating characteristic can be derived from the main personas (e.g. skill level) or from the events and timeline relative to the product (new users, returning users, users from month x, etc.)
Why use it?
This is a feedback loop practice, which allows the team to get prompt feedback from real life use of their changes.
The Cohort Analysis aims to produce actionable insights, which can inform better product decisions instead of using gut feel.
This practice enables product decisions for improvement, enhancement, overhaul or discontinuing of products/features. It is key practice in the sequence of practices which start with Design of experiments and aims to improve the product performance in terms of business outcomes.
The cohort analysis helps the team understand the impact of product/feature changes by comparing performance across comparable data sets (e.g. newly signed up users). It can help drive improvements towards a achieving a concrete and measurable goal, the pursuit of which results in change of user behaviour.
Related Practices
Personas
Further information
A Beginner’s Guide to Cohort Analysis: the Most Actionable (and Underrated) Report on Google Analytics by Patrick Han