If you own an online shopping store, offer any online services, have your iOS or android app at the marketplace etc you might be interested in knowing more than just the aggregate users count who are using your product or services.
The aggregate count is more misleading when you are offering the product as value added service and not the core monetizing product or service. For example you have a customer base of 1 million and for given month you have 100K unique users using the value added product. For me its not the adequate information to know about the user base.
When you analyze the unique users count for over period of time it goes more interesting. You may figure out that you have grown from 100 to 150K over six months but its still not the adequate information.
It would be more interesting to know how many users you lost and how many you gained to fill the gap of lost users.
Cohort is a group of people who share the common characteristics. Lets see few examples:
1- Users who started using your website in March purchased more than $200 shopping till July.
2- Students who graduated from college in 2010 had more average salary than previous 5 years.
3- Users who started using your iPhone app from 5.0 version onward showed more engagement than user using the app from previous versions.
4- 30% users discontinue using the app from 5th month onward.
5- 70% of the long term engaged users were electronic goods buyers of your website.
Once you get number around the user engagement over time you can focus on areas causing users to break the continuity of using your product and services. There would be some known Vs unknown reasons behind the churn.
Reasons like the upgrade vs of the application was not compatible to below 4.0 OS version may answer some drops. Some application stability related bugs introduced in recent upgrade might have affected some user base etc.
Competitive options might be available at significantly lower price causing users to switch over to other vendor.
The aggregate count is more misleading when you are offering the product as value added service and not the core monetizing product or service. For example you have a customer base of 1 million and for given month you have 100K unique users using the value added product. For me its not the adequate information to know about the user base.
When you analyze the unique users count for over period of time it goes more interesting. You may figure out that you have grown from 100 to 150K over six months but its still not the adequate information.
It would be more interesting to know how many users you lost and how many you gained to fill the gap of lost users.
Cohort is a group of people who share the common characteristics. Lets see few examples:
1- Users who started using your website in March purchased more than $200 shopping till July.
2- Students who graduated from college in 2010 had more average salary than previous 5 years.
3- Users who started using your iPhone app from 5.0 version onward showed more engagement than user using the app from previous versions.
4- 30% users discontinue using the app from 5th month onward.
5- 70% of the long term engaged users were electronic goods buyers of your website.
Once you get number around the user engagement over time you can focus on areas causing users to break the continuity of using your product and services. There would be some known Vs unknown reasons behind the churn.
Reasons like the upgrade vs of the application was not compatible to below 4.0 OS version may answer some drops. Some application stability related bugs introduced in recent upgrade might have affected some user base etc.
Competitive options might be available at significantly lower price causing users to switch over to other vendor.
