A cohort analysis enables you to observe how a specific group of customers evolves over time. In ChartMogul you can easily create and compare cohorts in the different charts to understand your customers behaviour. In this article, we will segment customers by quarter to see trends in acquisition and retention.

How to compare customer cohorts by quarter

1. Create a segment for the first quarter of 2016 by using the following filter: Customer since | Between | 2015-01-01 – 2015-03-31 and save the segment as “Q1 2015″.
2. Do the same for every other quarter that you would like to add to you cohort analyses.
3. Select Line and Stacked at the top left of the chart.

 Want to become a cohort analysis pro?

Check out The Ultimate Cohort Analysis Cheat Sheet, available for free on the ChartMogul Resources page! It includes:

What is a Cohort Analysis?

Why are they useful?

How to read a Cohort Analysis chart

Making Cohorts actionable with segmentation

What we learned

In this example comparison, we can see that the user acquisition slowed down after the Q2 2015 quarter but accelerated again in Q2 of 2016. Furthermore, we can see that there is a problem with retention that manifested in the Q2 2016 cohort. This is showing up as a steep decline in customer numbers after a few months:

Next steps 

Other than looking at the number of customers, we can also check the MRR retention of a cohort to see if the customers that are cancelling are large accounts, mainly small accounts or a mix of both. This might help us narrow down the root causes of the acceleration in cancellations.

Further, we can compare the same cohorts by plan to see if customers are being acquired at a faster rate on one of them. Secondly, we can check if they are more likely to churn on a specific plan. This might help the sales and marketing team to double down their efforts on promoting the plan with the best performance.