What is a cohort?
Used in a sentence: The users who signed up during the festive sale are a weaker cohort, so let's check their week two activity before we plan the next campaign.
How it works
A cohort is defined by a shared event or property at a point in time. The most common type is an acquisition cohort: everyone who installed or signed up in the same day, week or month. A behavioural cohort groups users by something they did, such as completing KYC or making a first purchase.
Once defined, the cohort is followed forward. Analytics tools plot what share of each cohort is still active, has converted or has paid at each interval after the starting event. Laying cohorts side by side, usually in a table or a set of retention curves, shows whether outcomes are improving as the product and campaigns change.
Example
A food delivery app redesigns its onboarding in the middle of a quarter. The growth team compares the weekly signup cohorts before and after the change. Cohorts that saw the new onboarding place a second order more often in their first fortnight, while older cohorts look unchanged. That tells the team the redesign helped new users, and it was not just a seasonal lift across everyone.
Cohort vs segment
| Cohort | Segment | |
|---|---|---|
| Defined by | A shared starting point or event in time | Current attributes or behaviour |
| Membership | Fixed once the user joins | Changes as users change |
| Main use | Comparing groups over time | Targeting and personalisation |
A cohort answers how a group evolves. A segment answers who matches a rule right now.
Best practices
- Pick one clear starting event per cohort, such as first app open or first purchase, and keep it consistent across reports.
- Compare cohorts of similar size and season so a festive spike does not look like a product win.
- Read cohorts at fixed intervals after the starting event, not by calendar date.
- Turn a struggling cohort into a campaign audience and measure it against a holdout group.
How to do this with Digia Engage
Digia reuses the cohorts and segments a team already maintains in CleverTap, MoEngage or WebEngage. A growth team picks the cohort as the audience, designs the in-app experience in the no-code builder, and sets the trigger event. The campaign reaches that cohort without an app release, and results can be compared across cohorts in the CEP. Setup details are on the CleverTap integration page.
Frequently asked questions
- What is cohort analysis used for?
- Cohort analysis shows how behaviour changes over time for groups that started at the same point. Teams use it to see whether a product change improved retention for new users, which acquisition channels bring users who stay, and when in their lifecycle users tend to drop off or start paying.
- How are cohorts used to target in-app campaigns?
- A cohort becomes an audience. A team might show an onboarding checklist only to users who installed this week, or a win-back offer to a cohort whose activity has dropped. Because the cohort definition updates as users move, the campaign reaches the right people without manual list uploads.
Related terms
Read more
Part of the In-app engagement glossary.