SmartVisuals Cohort Retention

Bind an entity and an event date. That is the whole setup.

SmartVisuals Cohort Retention derives the first-event date, the cohort, the period offset and the denominator for you, and it tells you which denominator it used. The five-part DAX recipe that cohort analysis usually needs - a first-event calculated column, a cohort key, a disconnected period table, an offset measure and a future-period guard - becomes unnecessary.

IT DOES NOT LIE

A cohort table is easy to get wrong in ways that look right. This one is built around not doing that, and every one of these is free in every tier:

• Unobserved cells are hatched, never rendered as zero. A cohort that has not lived twelve months yet does not report 0 percent at month twelve.
• Incomplete periods are outlined and excluded from averages by default, so a half-finished month cannot pass for a finished one.
• Cohorts with too few entities show their base count instead of a meaningless percentage.
• The denominator is named on screen, in a status strip that survives export to PDF and PowerPoint.

FOUR DENOMINATORS, THREE DEFINITIONS

• Cohort base, observed base, previous period, surviving base. Observed base is the shrinking denominator that period-over-period questions actually need.
• Classic, rolling and sequential retention. Each answers a different question, and the active one is named on the chart.
• Calendar or anniversary period alignment. Day, week, month, quarter or fiscal-year grain.

THREE VIEWS OF ONE AGGREGATION

The retention triangle, survival curves per cohort, and a layer cake of active entities over calendar time - the picture that answers whether growth is new business or retention.

BUILT FOR REPORTS, NOT DEMOS

Cross-filtering from any cell, cohort label or period header. Full keyboard navigation: the grid is a single tab stop and the arrow keys move between cells. High contrast support. English and Czech. Works on pre-aggregated data when the model is too large to send entity-level rows.

PREMIUM: VALUE AND COHORT COMPARISON

The free tier tells you how many came back. Premium tells you what they are worth and what to do about it.

• Follow the money: value retention (net revenue retention), revenue per active entity, and the cumulative lifetime value curve per cohort.
• Know when acquisition pays off: type in your acquisition cost and the visual marks the period each cohort repays it.
• Compare what matters: segments side by side on one colour scale, with significance markers that separate a real gap from noise.
• Judge against a standard: overlay your best, median or first cohort - or a target you type in - and tint every cell by its distance from the benchmark.
• Read the cause, not just the number: the age-vs-calendar panel separates "these cohorts are worse" from "that month was bad for everyone", and the insights strip names the best cohort, the worst, and the trend.
• See past the edge of your data: retention projection with a shifted-beta-geometric model, validated against the published Fader and Hardie reference.

This is the analysis teams rebuild by hand in a spreadsheet every month. One license replaces the spreadsheet.

Unlicensed viewers always see the full free tier. Never blocked, never watermarked.

Sample data and documentation: smartvisuals.io
Support: hello@smartvisuals.io