The power of user segmentation: how to use Mixpanel cohorts to grow your business

To drive business growth, you need to know your audience—but here’s the catch: not all users are created equal. People interact with your product in different ways, for different reasons, and at different stages. So, how do you cut through the noise and zero in on the ones that matter most?

Enter Mixpanel cohorts.

Mixpanel is an advanced analytics tool that tracks how people interact and engage with your product, app, or site. Mixpanel’s cohorts feature lets you group users based on shared behaviors or attributes and track how those groups evolve over time. It’s a powerful way to turn scattered data into focused insights—whether you’re validating an idea, spotting friction, or optimizing for growth.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a product manager, marketer, or founder—knowing how different audiences behave is key to improving user experience (UX), boosting conversions, and growing sustainably.

In this guide, we’ll explore:

• What Mixpanel cohorts are

• The different types of Mixpanel cohorts

• Why cohort analysis matters

• 4 ways to use Mixpanel cohorts to understand user behavior and improve UX

What are Mixpanel cohorts?

Mixpanel cohorts are groups of users broken down by specific characteristics or actions they complete within a defined time span. 

Instead of looking at all your users in one group, Mixpanel lets you categorize them based on their behavior and demographics, so you can use these insights to address their specific needs.

An example of a Mixpanel cohort based on date event properties

Types of Mixpanel cohorts

Let’s say you’ve just released a new product feature. Instead of tracking general feature adoption, you could see how specific cohorts are engaging with it—are new users adopting the feature as fast as active users? 

Each of these groups needs different information and nudges to get more value out of your product, app, or website.

Here are some examples of cohorts you can create and track in Mixpanel:

• New Users: any user who's signed up in the last 30 days. These users could benefit from receiving messages to help them realize the value of your product offering and complete onboarding.

• Active Users: any user who’s been active (as defined by your team) in the last 90 days and signed up more than 30 days ago. Users in this group already know the value of your product but benefit from messages that could convert them into Power Users.

• Power Users: this cohort is based on percentiles of activity relevant to your business. For example, an online store could include customers who made 3 or more purchases in the last 7 days here.

• Free/Paid Users: this cohort helps you compare the behavior between free users and paying customers. Do paid users trigger a certain event more or less often than free users? What features do they use? 

• Inactive Users: any user who hasn’t been active in the last 90 days and signed up more than 30 days ago. This cohort is commonly used for retention analysis where you group users based on their sign-up date.

Teams can compare Mixpanel cohorts against one another or the broader user population

Why cohort analysis matters

When it comes to data management and analysis, it’s essential to gather information from the right users, so you can track your most valuable—or vulnerable—customers, analyze their behavior, and cater to their specific needs. 

This type of analysis goes beyond generic user segmentation, empowering you to break up the large mass that represents everyone who’s ever used your product, app, or website into clearly-defined groups.

These user insights are more actionable because you can leverage and address them in a way that’s more specific to what the group needs to help you reach your goals, such as increased revenue and a better overall user experience.

💡Pro tip: engage Mixpanel cohorts through Contentsquare to get better feedback from your most valuable users.

By targeting cohorts with Contentsquare’s Surveys capability, you can collect information needed to make better decisions that delight your customers and improve conversions.

For example, if you only want to hear from users with a below-average customer lifetime value (CLTV), deploying a site-wide feedback widget and gathering answers from everyone who lands on your site won’t do you much good.

However, if you only target low CLTV customers, you’ll be well on your way to better understanding why this specific cohort spends less, helping you make insight-driven changes to your product that’ll encourage them to increase their order value.

Contentsquare’s feedback widget lets users submit their thoughts in real time as they explore your website

4 ways to use Mixpanel cohorts to understand user behavior and improve UX

Cohorts help you explore new, complex questions about your brand and digital product by segmenting users into groups that share valuable characteristics. 

Here are 4 ways to use them to dig deeper into user behavior and improve each specific experience:

1. Monitor and improve customer journeys

Each step of the customer journey—from people becoming aware of your business to becoming a product advocate—requires its own distinct approach. Segmenting users into cohorts helps you improve customer experience and create delight.

Using cohorts to monitor different types of users throughout their journeys helps you understand stage-specific needs, so you can identify issues sooner, customize your strategy at each touchpoint, and successfully move customers from one step to the next.

Create Mixpanel cohorts to track groups of users at different points in their lifecycles—such as New, Resurrected, Retained, and Dormant Users. Once you create the cohorts you’d like to track, head over to the Insights report in Mixpanel to visualize their evolution over time.

This data equips you to better understand what each group needs to get to their ‘aha’ moment, which is when they find value in your product and, ultimately, commit to a purchase. 

For example, New Users might need more guidance, which could translate into better user onboarding, while Resurrected Users might benefit from new feature announcements and product upgrades. 

Analyzing cohorts also helps you validate and approve optimizations with more confidence, giving you a better feel for how your changes resonate with users.

2. Pinpoint what makes users more likely to convert

Another great way of using Mixpanel cohorts is to understand what really persuades your users to convert. 

To do this in Mixpanel, set different interactions or critical events as cohorts and see which features lead to better or worse conversion rates for users. For example, you can look at how many times Active and Power Users viewed a sizing chart on your ecommerce store.

Comparing cohorts in the Mixpanel dashboard

Comparing these groups’ conversion rates in the Funnels report might show the Power Users cohort is more likely to make it to the end of the funnel than the Active Users cohort. This could suggest Active Users either don’t understand the feature, or it may not be valuable to the majority of users. 

A Funnels report in Mixpanel that compares cohorts

Knowing what critical events or features persuaded your existing customers to act gives you a clear picture of what you need to double down on—or stop doing—to convert even more of your future users.

💡Pro tip: leverage Contentsquare’s User Segmentation capability to learn more about your most valuable users.

Mixpanel’s personalized approach to user analytics helps you answer specific questions about your highest-converting cohorts. Contentsquare gives you actionable insights into how high-value users engage with your product.

By focusing on revenue-driving customer segments, you can learn how to improve their experience. For example, you could:

• Filter heatmaps to discover which parts of your product pages cause high-value customers the most frustration

Target high-value customers with surveys, asking them what products they’d like to see in your next campaign

Contentsquare’s User Segmentation capability helps you identify your high-value customers

3. Identify your most loyal customers and find out what makes them stick around

Most online businesses understand the importance of retaining users—it’s critical to achieving product-market fit and sustainable long-term growth. But what makes some users adopt your product while others abandon it after only a few days?

As a product analytics tool, Mixpanel helps you understand which users stick around and how often they return. 

Here’s how. Start by creating a cohort for your retained users directly from the Retention report. Next, investigate what entices your users to become loyal customers by exploring the different properties of this cohort in the Insights report. 

Then, it’s just a matter of diving deeper into their behavior by using an experience intelligence platform like Contentsquare to analyze recordings or ask for user feedback to identify what’s working well and why they stick around. This strategy unites your behavioral data and user retention metrics to help you understand (and improve) the user experience—so you keep customers around for the long run.

4. Locate where and why users drop off 

Retained users are happier customers who spend more time engaging with your product. But what about those who leave before they have a chance to experience your product’s true value?

Cohort analysis shows you exactly where users are dropping off and what specific actions led to it. Armed with these insights, you can determine why people are more likely to churn and optimize your product to win back their attention and increase conversion rates. 

Teams that use Mixpanel cohorts can also analyze the behaviors that precede customer churn, so they can find and fix issues like broken links and confusing interfaces. When disturbing trends start to appear in cohorts, you can react quickly to prevent the problem from affecting the rest of your user base.

💡Pro tip: to uncover why your drop-off rates are increasing—and how to fix it—use an exit-intent survey asking for feedback directly from your users. 

Once you understand why users leave, you’re ready to take action to reduce your churn rate and keep people engaged with your product.

Contentsquare’s Surveys capability offers a simple exit-intent survey template that can be launched and customized in a matter of minutes, giving you the insights you need to make impactful changes.

Use Contentsquare’s Surveys capability to ask your users for the constructive feedback you need to improve your site

Next steps with Mixpanel

Mixpanel cohorts let you filter important data to focus on specific kinds of users. But to get the most out of these segments, you also need to know what they can’t tell you. By solving this problem, you’ll discover even more about your users.

Use Contentsquare’s Session Replay capability alongside Mixpanel cohorts to truly understand what users want. Combining Contentsquare with Mixpanel means leveraging both quantitative and qualitative data, so you can learn: 

• How users experience and interact with your product, app, or website

• Where things go wrong (why users are churning)

• Where things go great (why customers stick around)

This gives you a complete overview of your data to help you uncover valuable insights and run a business your customers love to interact with.

FAQs about Mixpanel cohorts