Cohort analysis gives you valuable insight into your ability to convert first-buyers into regular customers. You achieve this by grouping your first-time customers from each month into cohorts and then by visualizing how much money these groups of customers spent in the subsequent months. Cohort analysis gives you a solid overview of how much of your revenue in any given month was gained from the first-time buyers and how much from the retained customers. It allows you to see whether you have a solid base of customers or your business is a one-time stop for the most. With this knowledge, you will be able to determine whether your business should focus more on the acquisition or retention of customers.

If you have a graph that looks like the one below, you clearly have a retention problem, as almost all of your customers are one-time buyers and never visit your website again. This is a big problem for your business, as the price of acquiring a new customer is usually quite high. Possible solutions to this problem are re-activation emails, discounts, and special weblayers for dormant/first-time visitors.

1600


# How to create cohort analysis

  1. Go to `Analyses` > `Reports` > `+ New Report`

  2. Select `purchase > timestamp` in the rows

  3. In the columns, create a simple aggregate for first purchase timestamp

  4. In the metrics, create a simple metric to sum the revenue of all lifetime purchases

Your settings should look as in the image below:

1120

  1. Set the chart to `area`

510