What is cohort analysis? Cohort analysis is a type of behavioral analytics in which you take a group of users, and analyze their usage patterns based on their shared traits to better track and understand their actions. A cohort is simply a group of people with shared characteristics. However, cohort members are often people but can be any type of entity we want to study: companies, products, or physical world phenomena.

Behavioral analytics is a recent advancement in business analytics that reveals new insights into the behavior of consumers on eCommerce platforms, online games, web and mobile applications, and Internet of Things (IoT).

Wikipedia says: “Business analytics (BA) refers to the skills, technologies, and practices for iterative exploration and investigation of past business performance to gain insight and drive business planning. Business analytics focuses on developing new insights and understanding of business performance based on data and statistical methods. In contrast, business intelligence traditionally focuses on using a consistent set of metrics to both measure past performance and guide business planning. In other words, business intelligence focusses on description, while business analytics focusses on prediction and prescription.” Business analytics is future focused, whereas business intelligence is focused on the past.