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Cohorts

Learn about user cohorts in Profiles.

  •   2 minute read  

This guide introduces you to the concept of cohorts in Profiles and shows how to use them in your Profiles project.

Overview

All businesses have core entities like customers. Within those entities, there are core segments that are tracked and interacted with across the business, for example, high value customers, brands, business segments, regions, etc.

In Profiles, you can create these enduring subsets by leveraging cohorts. You use the features of your Customer360 (C360) to filter entities into these cohorts. This gives you a stable definition for these important segments within the warehouse that you can leverage across the business.

Requirements

  • Features used for filtering must be defined in the entity/all cohort or other parent cohort var_group.

Usage

You can define cohorts in the profiles.yaml file, as shown:

# Cohort definition
models:
  - name: credit_card_user
    model_type: entity_cohort
    model_spec:
      extends: customers/all
      materialization:
        output_type: view
      filter_expression:
        AND:
          - "{{ customers.has_credit_card }} = 1"
      feature_views:
        - id: email
          name: credit_card_user_by_email

# Cohort Feature Definition
var_groups:
  - name: credit_card_user_vars
    entity_cohort: models/credit_card_user
    vars:
      - entity_var:
          name: total_sales
          select: sum(total)
          from: inputs/orders
      - entity_var:
          name: total_orders
          select: count(order_id)
          from: inputs/orders

Best practices

  • Use cohorts as sub-groups that require a standard definition, can be used across teams, and are needed to exist for a long period of time. For example, key customer segments, brands, or business units, but not a campaign audience.
  • Cohorts can also be a subset of another cohort. For example, you can create a cohort named known_mobile_users by filtering the known_users cohort.
  • A child cohort inherits all the features from their parent and can have features and feature views defined at the individual cohort level.

Questions? Contact us by email or on Slack