Cohorts (Premium Feature)
What are Cohorts?
It is a group of people with common characteristics in a specific period. Cohort analysis is useful, for example, when you want to know how a group of people interact with your brand. You can easily detect changes in trends and act accordingly.
What are the Benefits of Cohort Analysis?
- Zero configuration required if you are using MVMCloud Analytics's JavaScript tracker;
- See how your visitors behave after the acquisition date (purchase, registration, etc.);
- Compare the behaviors of a cohort with other cohorts, seeing metrics directly next to each other;
- View all key session and conversion metrics in the Cohorts report, including your website's retention rate, overall revenue, and revenue for individual goals.
- Segment your reports by cohort and see how individual cohorts perform. Then compare this to other cohorts to gain useful insights.
How to View the Cohort Report
In the left menu, click Visitors > Cohorts. Cohort reports will be displayed based on the currently selected date range:
The displayed cohort range will be the last N cohorts for the currently selected period. You can change this number using the threshold selector in the Cohorts report, this selector will appear when you hover the mouse in the lower right corner of the tabular report, as shown in the image:
Both the graph and the table show the same information, just in different ways. Although the graph is just a standard time series, the cohort table will show how cohorts behave over time.
The metric displayed in the report can be configured via the drop-down menu in the top right corner of the report:
By default, the metric displayed is "% Returning Visitors", which is the percentage of visitors in the cohort who visited the column again. This metric can be used to see when users stop visiting your website.
Note: When you change the metric, MVMCloud Analytics will remember and load that metric the next time you view the report. User-based reports are only available for daily and weekly reports.
How to view cohorts for different periods
To view cohorts in week, month, or year periods, simply click and select that period type in the period selector at the top of the page:
What can I learn from the Cohorts report?
Grouping visitors by acquisition date allows you to see how your retention rates respond to your business activities.
View the report of the dates something important occurred and see how it affected your ability to maintain your users returning to your website. For example, let's say you're building a web app and you released a new feature that was frequently requested. You can load the cohorts report for dates close to launch day to see if your churn rate has decreased.
You can also use the report to explain changes in your visitor engagement on certain days. Let's say you have a blog and their retention rate dropped by half on a specific day. Maybe some or all of the content produced that day isn't what interests your audience.
Finally, you can view the cohorts report for different segments to compare the engagement of different types of visitors. For example, you may find that your engagement with Microsoft Edge users is much lower than with Chrome users, due to your site doing certain advanced things that are supported by Chrome but not Microsoft Edge.
As always, you need to be creative when exploring your data, but if you have questions about your engagement, this report is where you should start looking for answers.
Cohort targeting
segmentation is a filter that you can apply to your data to obtain even more information about your audience. You can create a segmentation and then see the cohort report for it, see how:
- Create a new segmentation as shown in the figure below:
- As an example, let's create a segment that allows us to query reports of visitors whose first visit was on June 7, 2023.
- After creating the segmentation, you can see the cohort for it (note the date July 7, 2023)
What can I learn by segmenting my cohorts?
Cohort segmentation is where the true power of cohort analysis lies. After using the report from the previous section To identify interesting cohorts, you can create a segment for that cohort and drill down into the specifics of their behavior.
If you run an eCommerce store and notice that visitors who were purchased on a specific day rarely come back to spend money, viewing other reports for these low-performing visitors can help you find an explanation. You can go further and compare reports from this underperforming cohort with other cohorts that have made repeated purchases.
Tracking Configuration
When you install the MVMCloud Analytics JavaScript tracker code on your site, it automatically turns on tracking to generate the cohorts, nothing needs to be done. done additionally.