Identify users with similar behaviors

Amplitude Academy

Get Started with Amplitude Analytics

Learn the most fundamental features of Amplitude Analytics, including cohorts.

A behavioral cohort groups users by the actions they take in your product within a specific time window, such as users who watched three episodes the day they signed up. Amplitude supports two cohort types: predictive cohorts, which use machine learning to forecast future behavior, and behavioral cohorts, which match users against event-based rules you define.

Use a behavioral cohort when the rule for membership is an observed action, like "completed checkout twice last week." Use a predictive cohort instead when you want Amplitude to forecast who is likely to convert, churn, or take an action.

You need at least one defined cohort before you can use one in a chart. If you haven't built one yet, go to Define a new cohort first.

Behavioral cohort restrictions

Organizations on the Plus plan have a limit of five behavioral cohorts.

After you create a cohort, you can add it as a segment in many Amplitude charts.

Examples of behavioral cohorts include:

Users who watch three consecutive episodes of a TV show in the first day after signing up for a video streaming service
Users who enable push notifications during onboarding
Android users who abandoned their carts on an e-commerce site in the last month

Behavioral data reveals how engagement with your product affects retention, conversion, revenue, and other business outcomes.

Cohorts are useful across the Amplitude platform. To segment your data by cohorts, select Cohort in the Segmentation Module, and then choose the cohort from the dropdown list.

For any chart or query that segments on a cohort, the segmented cohort automatically recomputes whenever the chart generates. You can manually recompute the cohort at any time by clicking the refresh icon.

If you have the Accounts add-on, you can apply a group-level cohort instead of a cohort of users. When you select a specific group type, only the cohorts it contains appear in the drop-down list on the right side of the equals sign:

You can also create a chart using the cohort directly from the Cohort page.

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