Historical Count, part 1: Track user behavior for different instances of each user action

Historical Count captures the Nth instance (first through fifth) of any user event and exposes it as an event property you can filter on in charts and cohorts. Use it to compare behavior between users who performed an action once versus users who performed it three or five times, for example to isolate the conversion rate of first-time Play Song users against repeat listeners.

Use Historical Count when you want to filter or segment by the Nth occurrence of a specific event within a single chart or cohort. If you need to group users by total lifetime count or by behavior across multiple events, use a behavioral cohort instead.

You can also use it to identify your best customers based on the number of times they’ve taken a critical action in your product, like completing a purchase in an e-commerce platform or playing a song in a music streaming app.

For example, if your product is a music streaming platform, Historical Count could highlight the usage differences between users who have performed the Play Song event for the first time and those who've triggered it multiple times.

Historical Count is not the same as Amplitude's behavioral cohorts. However, you can use Historical Count in a behavioral cohort.

You need instrumented events before Historical Count returns data. If you haven't instrumented events yet, go to the Event Segmentation chart docs first.

Other important things to note about this feature:

Historical Count supports these operators: = (is), ≠ (is not), < (less), ≤ (less or equal), > (greater), ≥ (greater or equal).
You can select only one Historical Count property at a time.
Historical Count is an event property available on the Event Segmentation, Funnel Analysis, Pathfinder, and Retention Analysis charts.
- In a funnel analysis, Historical Count works only on funnels set to in this order.
- You can apply an Historical Count filter only to the first event in the Pathfinder and Retention Analysis charts.
- However, you can apply it to multiple events when doing event segmentation and funnel analyses.
Historical Count is also available in behavioral cohorts, with limitations:
- You can't use "Any Event" or "Any Active Event" with Historical Count in dynamic cohorts.
- If you create a cohort using "Any Event where Historical Count = 1", it becomes a static cohort.

This article is part 1 of a series on Historical Count. Be sure to read the next Help Center articles in the series:

How Amplitude defines Historical Count

Generally speaking, Historical Count can tell you if it's a user's first time triggering a specified event, or their fifth. But there are some constraints to be aware of here.

Amplitude's definition of Nth time is itself time-limited, to include a period of up to one year before the beginning of the date range of your analysis.

For example, say a user performed the Play Song event for the first time on February 20, 2019, and then did so again on March 20, 2019. To include the user's true first performance of the Play Song event, your chart's date range must begin no later than February 19, 2020. If your chart covers March 1, 2020 to March 31, 2020, Amplitude treats the event performed on March 20, 2019 as the user's first interaction with the Play Song event.

Apply a Historical Count filter

To apply a Historical Count filter, follow these steps:

In your Events Module, choose the event you're interested in. Then click + Filter by.
Scroll down to Amplitude Event Properties and select Historical Count.
Choose the correct operator and specify the N-value (first through fifth) that you're interested in.

In the example above, the chart includes users who performed the Send Message event with a Historical Count of three.

Continue to the second article in the Historical Count series: Historical Count, part 2: Order of operations.

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