Cohort analysis

Cohort Analysis shows you how groups of customers — called cohorts — behave over time, starting from when they first subscribe. ChartMogul groups customers by the interval in which they started their first subscription (day, week, month, quarter, or year) and tracks churn, retention, and conversion metrics across each subsequent interval.

Use Cohort Analysis to find out whether retention is improving over time — or whether aggregate numbers are masking underlying churn. You can identify when in the customer lifecycle churn peaks, measure how a product release or campaign affected a specific cohort, or compare retention across pricing plans and sales reps using segmentation.

Here’s what we cover in this article:

• How cohorts are useful
• Reading a cohort table
• Cohort curves
• Cohort analyses in ChartMogul
• Configuring your analysis
• Exporting your analysis
• Understanding the data
• Segmenting cohorts

Resources and further reading:

• Cohort Analysis: A (practical) Q&A (The Angel VC)
• What is Churn? How Can It Be Negative? And What’s a Good Monthly Churn Rate?
• Make trial-to-paid conversion rates more meaningful with cohorts

Before You Start

Read more about how ChartMogul organizes and classifies MRR movements.

How cohorts are useful

To grow a SaaS business, you need customers to continually renew their subscriptions. So it’s important to identify points in your customer lifecycle that result in downgrades (contraction) or cancellations (churn).

Instead of looking at the overall churn rate for all customers, cohorts allow you to compare groups of customers based on when they subscribe so you can answer questions like:

• Which month in the lifespan of a subscription is churn at its highest?
• How did last month’s product release impact churn?
• How is retention for customers who subscribed in February during our Valentine’s marketing campaign?
• How is retention for customers who signed up using a discount?

Reading a cohort table

Cohort Analysis results appear in a cohort table — a grid where each row is a group of customers who subscribed in the same interval, and each column represents a subsequent interval of their subscription lifecycle. This layout differs from standard reports and takes a moment to get used to.

Columns

The first and second columns (1) display each cohort’s name (identified by the time of conversion, e.g., Feb 2023) and its value. The remaining columns (2) represent each interval of the cohort’s existence (day, week, month, quarter, or year, depending on the cohort type).

Rows

Each row (3) is an individual cohort. Cohorts appear in chronological order. The last row (4) provides an average of the relevant metric across cohorts for each interval.

Cells

Cells (5) show the relevant metric depending on the cohort analysis you select (e.g., churn, expansion, contraction or reactivation) and how you configure it. Future intervals (6) are blank.

Colors

ChartMogul assigns a color to each metric to help you interpret your analysis:

• Green — the best value (lowest churn or highest retention rate)
• Yellow — the middle value
• Red — the worst value
• Shades in between — values along the green-yellow-red gradient, relative to the best and worst metrics in your current analysis

Cohort curves

Every cohort report includes a cohort curves chart — a line graph that draws each cohort as a separate curve, making it easier to compare how cohorts evolve over time. The chart reflects the settings you choose for the report.

• Check a row's checkbox to include that cohort on the chart.
• Shift+click a row to select or deselect a range at once.
• Check the Average row to overlay the weighted average curve.
• The chart is visible by default. Click HIDE REPORT to hide it.

Cohort analyses in ChartMogul

ChartMogul offers the following cohort analyses — each tracking a different metric across cohort intervals — which you access by choosing Data Lab > Cohort Analyses from the main navigation.

Churn

• Customer Churn — the percentage or number of customers who have canceled all of their subscriptions, offset by reactivation. This cohort analysis is called Paid Subscriber Churn for accounts with free trial support.
• Net MRR Churn — the percentage or amount (in your primary currency) of MRR lost due to cancellations, offset by expansion and reactivation.
• Quantity Churn — the percentage or number of subscription downgrades or cancellations, offset by expansion and reactivation.

Retention

• Customer Retention — the percentage or number of customers who have one or more active subscriptions, including reactivation. Learn more. This cohort analysis is called Paid Subscriber Retention for accounts with free trial support.
• Net MRR Retention — the percentage or amount in your primary currency of MRR from active subscriptions, expansion, and reactivation, minus churn and contraction. Learn more.
• Quantity Retention — the percentage or number of subscriptions still active, including expansion, churn and contraction.

Conversion

• Conversion of Non-Subscription Customers to Subscribers — the number or percentage of customers who previously made a non-recurring purchase and then purchased a subscription in the selected month. (Available on our Scale and Volume plans)

• Trial to Paid Conversion — the percentage or number of customers who converted from a free trial to a paid subscription, grouped by the interval in which their trial started.

Configuring your analysis

Type

Use the Type drop-down to select an interval for your analysis:

• Daily cohorts
• Weekly cohorts
• Monthly cohorts (default)
• Quarterly cohorts
• Annual cohorts

Start

Select a time frame for your analysis using the Start date picker. Depending on your Type setting, select the starting day, week, month, quarter, or year.

Show

Use the Show drop-down to choose Percent or, depending on the cohort analysis you select, Customers (labeled Paid Subscribers for accounts with free subscription support), MRR, Quantity, or Conversion.

Relative to

If you select Percent from the Show drop-down, you can use the Relative to drop-down to choose Previous day/week/month/quarter/year or Starting day/week/month/quarter/year.

With Previous day/week/month/quarter/year, ChartMogul calculates the metric as a rate relative to the previous interval. With Starting day/week/month/quarter/year, ChartMogul calculates it relative to Cohort Value.

Include current day/week/month/quarter/year

Select Include current day/week/month/quarter/year to include data for the current interval and keep your analysis up to date.

How ChartMogul Calculates Cohort Data

Cohorts

A customer joins a cohort when they become a subscriber for the first time, i.e., when their status changes from one of the lead statuses (New Lead, Working Lead, Qualified Lead, or Unqualified Lead) to Active Subscriber. Each customer remains in their original cohort regardless of whether they sign up for or purchase a second subscription (expansion) or cancel (churn) and re-subscribe (reactivation).

Intervals

Follow the development of each cohort by interval (day, week, month, quarter, or year), starting with interval 0 (when the customers subscribed) and continuing for each interval of the cohort’s existence.

Let’s take a monthly cohort analysis as an example. For a customer who subscribed on April 19, month 0 is April 19–April 30, month 1 is May 1–May 31, month 2 is June 1–June 30, and so on.

The actual dates for a given month differ between cohorts. What matters is the distance in months from sign-up — for example, knowing that churn peaks at month 3 is a key insight.

Cohort Value

Depending on the cohort analysis you select, Cohort Value represents one day, week, month, quarter, or year of:

• Total MRR (in your primary currency)
• Number of paid subscribers
• Number of subscriptions acquired

In the following example, the May 2025 cohort had 42 paid subscribers.

Metrics

Depending on the cohort analysis you select, ChartMogul displays one of the following metrics in table cells:

• Conversion — the number of non-subscription customers who started a subscription
• Customers — the number of active customers after churn, expansion, and reactivation
• MRR — the amount of MRR after churn, expansion, and reactivation
• Quantity — the number of active subscriptions after churn, expansion, and reactivation
• Percent — the percentage in change, either relative to the previous month or the starting month

In our example, 9.52% of paid subscribers in the May 2025 cohort had churned in month 1.

Select the cell to see a complete list of churn activities.

Average

The Average row shows the average Cohort Value across all cohorts, and the average of the selected metric across all cohorts for each interval. ChartMogul accounts for cohort size (i.e., the number of customers) when calculating these averages.

For example, in a given month, a cohort of two customers experiences 50% churn while a cohort of 100 experiences 25%. The average churn rate (across the two cohorts, weighted by the number of customers) is 25.49% (total number of customers lost / total number of customers) and not 37.5% (the average of the two percentages).

Learn more about weighted averages.

How to Export Your Analysis

1. Open your cohort analysis.
2. Click the Export as CSV button to download the data.

Segmenting cohorts

Add segmentation to your cohort analysis to answer questions like:

• When does a particular pricing plan experience its highest churn?
• Which sales representative has the highest retention rate?
• How does NPS score correlate with churn rate?