In the context of marketing, generalization is a thing of the past. Today, competition is so overwhelming that you need to focus each of your campaigns as precisely as possible.
If you try to save costs or logistical effort by developing a vague advertising strategy without a specific target audience, you’ll be doomed to failure. The same will happen if you launch a new, highly targeted campaign, but this time without prior analysis of your market’s needs.
From these two ideas, two key concepts emerge: personalization and analysis . Combining both concepts gives rise to cohort analysis as the mechanism for initiating your investigations, tailored to your audience’s niche .
If your business covers a very broad population, you can have several cohorts. You’ll simply need to group your audience according to their most notable characteristics, and once you understand these groups, you can design a strategy for each one .
What are cohorts in Google Analytics?
Based on the above, cohort analysis is the specification of the groups obtained from the segmentation of a business’s population .
It’s a full-fledged research project. In cohort analysis, you must consider a careful selection of criteria to identify each group and specify their behavior: What are their interests? How do they purchase within the sales funnel ? How much are they willing to spend?
How to perform a cohort analysis in Google Analytics?
To perform a cohort analysis, the best option is to use specialized software to assist you throughout the process, and Google Analytics is undoubtedly the best option.
How do you perform cohort analysis in Google Analytics? Follow these steps :
- Of course, you’ll need to access Google Analytics and log in with your regular Google account.
- Once inside, you’ll need to go to the ” Audience ” tab and then click on “Cohort Analysis.”
- Next, you must configure the tool according to your needs . At this point, you’ll need to specify the type of cohort you’ll be analyzing, as well as its size. You can also apply certain metrics and set the time period considered in the analysis.
Which cohorts are most important?
- First product purchased: This involves grouping people according to the first item or service they purchased. What’s the purpose of this indicator? It will serve as a reference for which of your products are most likely to capture the attention of new customers.
- First month since first conversion: This indicator allows you to determine how people behaved within a reasonable timeframe from the first conversion. Were they satisfied with the results? With this cohort, you’ll have a very clear picture of how they performed.
- Traffic source: Have you ever wondered where your followers came from? With this cohort, you’ll be able to find out. This way, you can boost the sources that generate the most traffic instead of those that perform less well.
- First Conversion Campaign: If you want to determine which of your marketing strategies is the most successful, you should opt for this option. This cohort will allow you to measure which media captures people’s attention. Undoubtedly, very valuable information!
Benefits of cohort analysis
Through cohort analysis, you’ll gain a wealth of useful information for your marketing strategy. Here’s how:
- The data is very accurate: if you segment your cohorts well and create good analytics indicators, you’ll have information that’s 100% representative of your audience’s behavior. You’ll be able to make decisions based on real and transparent data.
- They allow you to project customer behaviors: Once you know your audience’s interests, you can define a buyer persona . By understanding their interests, as well as their problems, you can be one step ahead in launching marketing and sales strategies with a high probability of success.
- You can measure your performance: Based on the results obtained, you can conduct a retrospective study. Cohort analysis will allow you to critically examine how all your strategies have performed.
Example of cohort analysis
An example of cohort analysis could be recording the number of people who begin following you after the creation of a new business line. What data could you extract? A lot!
From the appeal of your new business project to the receptiveness of your marketing strategies, did you use online or offline channels ? Through cohort analysis, you can determine which worked best.
Have you decided to expand your business to another community? You can create a cohort by differentiating between people in that geographic segment who converted. This way, you can compare them with your original audience to gauge whether expanding your business was a good idea.
But that’s not all! If you have a historical record of the beginnings of your original audience, you can compare it with the data from this new cohort. This will allow you to have a realistic projection of what to expect from your new project.
As you may have noticed, cohort analysis allows you to gain a wealth of information . You simply need to combine your analytical skills with your creativity to extract useful information in many areas of your business.