Cohort Analysis
In one line
Cohort analysis groups users by a shared starting characteristic — usually signup week — and tracks their behaviour over time so you can see how each cohort evolves.
Going deeper
Cohort analysis groups users by something they share at the start — signup week, acquisition channel, first action — and tracks how each group behaves over time. A single aggregated number blends all cohorts together; cohorts pull the real movement back into view.
The most useful version is the retention cohort chart. Stack signup weeks down the rows and 1-, 2-, 4-, 8-week retention across the columns, and you can immediately see whether new cohorts are retaining better after a product change. A single average can't show that.
Cohort size matters. If a weekly cohort has fewer than ~50 users, noise dominates and you should usually fall back to monthly cohorts. In low-volume B2B contexts, cohort analysis can hit a hard floor where qualitative review becomes more useful than the chart.
Related terms
Retention
Retention is the share of users who continue to use or purchase from your product over time after their first touch — a primary signal of long-term product health.
MarketingChurn Rate
Churn rate is the percentage of customers who leave or cancel during a given period — effectively the mirror image of retention.
MarketingLTV
Lifetime value (LTV) is the estimated total revenue — or profit — a single customer is expected to generate over the entire relationship with your business.
MarketingMAU / DAU
MAU and DAU (Monthly and Daily Active Users) count the unique users who actually engaged with your product in a given window — the standard size and stickiness metric for digital products.
MarketingGA4
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is Google's current analytics platform for web and app, built on an event-based data model rather than the session-centric model that defined Universal Analytics.