Quick Guide: Cohort Retention Analysis in Shopify

Cohort analysis is a powerful tool in understanding your customers behavior. It’s also a little daunting at first.

This guide will teach you how to quickly view and understand your customer retention numbers using By the numbers, a Shopify app.

But first some definitions:

Cohort The group of Customers that made their first purchase in a given period.

Retention: If a first-time customer buys something in January and returns to buy something in a later month, then they are a returned Customer.

Getting started with Cohort Analysis

First if you haven’t already installed By the numbers do so, it has a free 14-day trial and no credit card is needed. Then select the Insights tab and look for a card called Retention by cohort. Click View report and you should see something like this:

The above chart tells you a few things:

• The first purchase month of each cohort
• The size of each cohort (the number of Customers)
• The percentage of that cohort that was retained each following month

You can now deploy more sophisticated retention and repurchase campaigns by easily seeing which marketing campaigns performed better with regards to customer retention. Either dropping poorer performing campaigns or doubling down on more successful ones.

For a more in depth explanation you can read the help docs on cohort retention.