Ultimate Guide on Using Cohort Analysis to Understand Users' Behaviours
Every day, a lot of users come to your website — some make a purchase, some abandon your site without checking out. Both entered with the intention of making a purchase, but one proceeded to checkout while the other abandoned. User disengagement is the harsh reality of your online business — no matter what you do to retain customers, sooner or later they will move on.
With all this happening, questions arise: what can you do to reduce shopping cart abandonment? What was their average order value like? When is the best time to re-engage with your users? What rate should you acquire new users at to maintain your website conversion rate? Through cohort analysis, you get answers to all such questions.
You can’t completely stop user disengagement from occurring, but you can certainly reduce the disengagement rate. By focusing on this, you can effectively reduce customer attrition and re-engage with them before it’s too late. You also need a constant flow of new users to compensate for those lost over time and maintain your conversion rate.
All About Cohort Analysis
Cohort analysis is all about user disengagement. A cohort is a group of users who showed common characteristics, attributes or experience in a particular time frame. All users who visit your website from a particular country belong to the ‘same country’ cohort. Similarly, all users who visit for the first time on a particular date belong to that date’s cohort. A user can be a member of multiple cohorts at the same time depending on how you segment and interpret the data.
If you are looking out for any help with your business and fixing your Google Analytics and conversion issues, feel free to contact us at info@librawebsolutions.com.
Cohort Analysis Report in Google Analytics
You can analyze cohort behaviour through any Google Analytics report, but the cohort analysis report has been specially developed for this purpose. It’s especially useful for understanding the behaviour of different cohorts in response to time-sensitive, short-term marketing campaigns like Christmas sales, new email campaigns, or Cyber Monday.
Cohort Type
Cohort type is the dimension that characterizes the cohorts — you can select only one type at a time. Currently, only one cohort type is available: acquisition date, the date users started their very first session on your website.
Cohort Size
Cohort size has been defined in terms of time frame — by day (all users acquired on the same day), by week (acquired during the same week), or by month (acquired during the same month).
If you are looking out for any help with your business and fixing your Google Analytics and conversion issues, feel free to contact us at info@librawebsolutions.com.
Metrics
Metrics present in cohort analysis fall into three categories: ‘Per user,’ ‘Retention,’ and ‘Total.’ Only the ‘Retention’ category contains a single metric called ‘user retention’ — the percentage of users in a cohort who returned in the Nth day, week, or month, and the default metric in the report.
Date Range
Date range is the time period for which cohort data should be displayed, and depends on the cohort size selected — for ‘by day,’ options include the last 7, 14, 21 or 30 days; for ‘by month,’ options include the last month, last 2 months, or last 3 months.
Cohort Analysis and Data Sampling Issues
Cohort analysis reports suffer from data sampling issues more than other Google Analytics reports, especially when advanced segments are applied — advanced segments can greatly skew your cohort data.
If you are looking out for any help with your business and fixing your Google Analytics and conversion issues, feel free to contact us at info@librawebsolutions.com. At Libra Web Solutions we successfully transformed around 80 ecommerce ventures for customers from UK, Australia, India, Hong Kong, Singapore since 2008.
Sharmila specializes in business development, lead generation, and customer service. She has an interest in bringing traditional businesses online, and currently handles business development and customer support at Libra Web Solutions.