What is Cohort Analysis?
Grouping users by shared start time or behavior, then tracking each group retention or revenue over its own lifetime. Cohorts reveal whether product changes help new users or just reflect older, stickier ones.
Related terms
Funnel Analysis
Measuring stepwise conversion through an ordered series of events to find where users drop off. Funnels turn vague activation complaints into a specific step with a specific leak to fix first.
Event Tracking
Recording user actions as timestamped events with properties, the raw material of product analytics. Clean event tracking answers what users do before asking why; replays and surveys explain the motivations behind the counts.
Conversion Rate
Visitors completing a goal divided by total visitors. The metric that turns traffic into money; intent-matched pages convert multiples higher than mismatched ones at equal volume.
Autocapture
Automatic collection of clicks, pageviews, and form interactions without per-element instrumentation. Fast to start but noisy: retroactive data comes with vague names and mystery events that explicit tracking would have labeled.
Explicit Events
Hand-defined tracking calls placed at meaningful product moments: signup completed, checkout started, invite sent. Explicit events cost engineering time upfront and pay back in clean names and trustworthy funnels.
Event Taxonomy
The naming contract for analytics: object-action conventions, required properties, and ownership per event. Taxonomies prevent the analytics swamp where three teams log the same signup three different ways.