DISQUS

Andrew Chen (@andrew_chen): How to measure if users love your product using cohorts and revisit rates

  • Kevin Hillstrom · 1 year ago
    You might enjoy looking up the concept of a Life Table, via Google or Wikipedia. The math behind a life table fuels the fees insurance companies charge, determines when a crisis will occur with Social Security, and applies perfectly to the situation you are discussing.
  • Andrew Chen · 1 year ago
    in fact, I first read about that concept in your book ;-)
  • Patrick Lee · 1 year ago
    great stuff! just sent it to the tech team. thanks! =)
  • christianbusch · 1 year ago
    Hi Andrew, exactly right way to look at site data. The definition of engagement may vary by site (e.g. time on site vs page views vs repeat frequency) but besides that, this is the right way to look at things. One of our key metrics is cohort activation - i.e. what % of new users is still active 30/60/90 days later. The difficulty with a lot of this data is that you have to setup your database and query tools early on in order to capture the data and you have to be disciplined about it. But once you're capturing it, great way to track the site performance.
  • Pete Mauro · 1 year ago
    Not sure if this is a fair question, but what do you guys think is a good revisit rate?

    I think you alluded to this by mentioning that you should track acquisition source but it would be interesting to see the revisit rates by funnel. Perhaps it would show a longer view of ROI / effectiveness for each acquisition method.
  • Nate Davis · 7 months ago
    Great observations Andrew, and very helpful for my business partners and I who are facing the scenario of extremely low engagement for our social networking iPhone app (Borange--available now). We'll certainly be keeping these points in mind as we revamp the initial user experience and setup process, as the vast majority of customers have only used the product once and then gone idle.
  • David Reinke · 2 months ago
    I agree cohort analysis is best - especially for key strategy team members. However, the shorthand metric that I use with our entire team is Average Monthly (or weekly) Visits per Visitor. This is simply taking total visits divided by unique visitors. This metric is a single number that, when combined with traffic growth can tell the team whether engagement is growing/declining. It's obviously negatively affected if you have a big increase in the % of new users to your site....however, we really like this number as a balance to pure traffic growth.