Acquisition Cohort

An acquisition cohort is a group of users who first arrived in a product within the same time window and whose later behaviour is tracked together.

Membership is fixed by the date of first visit and never changes, so the population is stable and the share still active can be measured week after week. The difference from a behavioural cohort is the membership rule: here it is when someone arrived, there it is what they did. A common error is comparing cohorts acquired through different channels, since a weaker curve in one month may reflect a high-volume campaign with low-intent visitors rather than any change in the product.