Glossary
Cohort analysis
Grouping players by when they arrived, usually their registration or first-deposit month, and tracking each group's revenue and activity month by month. It shows whether a batch of traffic keeps earning or fades.
Also called: cohort report, cohort table, vintage analysis.
A cohort table puts arrival months in rows and months since arrival in columns: month 0, month 1, month 2. Each cell holds NGR, active players or deposits for that group at that age. Reading down a column compares batches at the same age; reading across a row shows how a single batch decays. Affiliate managers use it to judge an affiliate's traffic, often before raising or cutting a CPA.
It answers what totals hide. Hypothetically, your January players brought $4,000 of NGR in month 0 and still $2,500 in month 3, while your May players brought $5,000 in month 0 and $1,000 in month 1. May looked bigger and is the weaker source. On RevShare and hybrid deals, the cohort curve is how you estimate what a player is worth and how long payback takes.
Ask the program for data by month of FTD and by sub ID; a dashboard that shows only the current month mixes old and new players and hides decay. Cohorts need time, so judge a source on 2–3 months of data, not the first week.
Related terms: Churn rate, LTV, ARPU, RevShare, Sub ID.