Cohort Analysis

For those of you who don’t know, cohort analysis is one of Google Analytics’ newest features—and it’s caused a bit of confusion among digital marketers.

Unlike their other metrics, this one is dynamic, which means that it changes over time. This figure describes the behavior of your website visitors over a specific period so, when used correctly, you can use cohort analysis to get a better insight into the sorts of experiences customers have with your brand and use this information to make any necessary improvements.

How Cohort Analysis Works

Before we delve any further into our explanation of cohort analysis, we need to better define what a “cohort” actually is. In short, it’s a group of website visitors who have some sort of characteristics in common. Needless to say, you’ll have to identify this trait before running a cohort analysis report on Google Analytics.

This metric comes in especially handy if you’ve just launched a trial or teaser promotion. You’ll get a better idea of how many customers came back as a result of the campaign. Then if the rates are lower than expected, you can theorize what went wrong and create a plan to improve things.

Alternatively, you can monitor the behavior of individual groups more generally on a day-by-day, week-by-week, month-by-month, or year-by-year basis—relative to when the user first visited your website.

You should note: If you want to use cohort analysis, you’ll need the following three pieces of information to act as “anchors.”

• The Cohort Definition: This is the time period you want to analyze. It defines the moment you start and finish tracking the behavior of your website visitors. You can further filter this cohort by analyzing specific customers from an array of sources like YouTube, Facebook, Google, etc.
• The Lagging Period: This is how long you want your cohort analysis to run for.
• The Termination Time of Your Report: This is when your cohort analysis finishes.

Once you’ve decided on the above and plugged it into Google Analytics, you’re good to go!