How to do your Cohorts analysis in Spreadsheet & Excel (A detailed guide)

Yemi Johnson
8 min readDec 27, 2016
Image source: Intercom.io

Since my daily grind is filled with spinning excel tables, I decided to gift myself with a headache this Christmas: I exported user’s emails and purchase dates so that I could build my cohorts and glean some other useful insights. I soon became stuck on which formula to use, how to write my IF statements, running into cyclical redundancies, and being jammed by arguments that made no sense.

So I am writing this now for everyone else that’s building their cohorts table and getting stuck. If you are an Excel buff, it’s okay if you stop reading now — it’s nothing you don’t already know.

For the uninitiated, a cohort is a group of users that share a common characteristic defined by a period in time. For instance, the retention rate of all users that signed up to use your app in January.

The method shared in this tutorial is best for businesses that have infrequent customers and are transactional. Example: online hotel and flight booking.

If you want to run cohorts analysis on a subscription business, please follow this other tutorial on how to do cohorts analysis for

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Yemi Johnson

Sheryl Sandberg impersonator @ Hotels.ng. I write my best thoughts on Twitter, follow me @yemi_uc. Sign up to my newsletter here: yemijohnson.com