Cohort report

The cohort report shows you how fast it takes to make your ad spend back and tracks revenue generated from ads over time. This report is invaluable for businesses with long sales cycles, trial opportunities, or recurring revenue models.

What business question does this report answer?

The cohort report answers two critical questions:

1. How fast does it take to make your ad spend back? (Breakeven point)
2. Per day, week, month, or quarter, how much revenue was generated from ads that ran in a specific time period?

This helps you understand sales velocity and optimize for faster returns on ad spend.

How the cohort report works

The cohort report tracks revenue generated from ads over time, organized by when the ads ran (not when purchases happened).

Reading the report

The report shows:

• Time period (week, month, quarter) when ads ran
• Spend - Total ad spend for that period
• Revenue by time period - How much revenue was generated in subsequent periods
• Breakeven - Which time period the ads reached profitability

Example reading

Looking at the week between the 1st and 7th:

• Spend: $7,383
• Week 1 (first week ads ran): Generated $0 revenue
• Week 2: Generated $6,000 revenue
• Week 3: Generated $1,500 revenue (total $7,500)
• Breakeven: Week 3 (when cumulative revenue exceeded initial spend)

This shows exactly how long it took for ads from that week to become profitable.

Report controls and views

Time granularity

You can view cohort data by:

• Day
• Week
• Month
• Quarter

Channel and campaign drill-down

You can drill into specific channels or campaigns to see:

• How fast do they break even?
• Do they even break even?

This allows you to compare performance across different marketing channels and optimize accordingly.

Absolute revenue view

In addition to the default breakeven view, you can look at data as "Absolute" revenue. This shows the total revenue generated from ads in a specific period, regardless of whether they broke even.

This view is particularly useful for:

• Evaluating campaigns with discounts or coupons
• Ensuring promotional campaigns drive enough total revenue despite lower margins
• Comparing total revenue impact across different campaign types

Example use cases

Improving sales velocity and breakeven time

Companies have used the cohort report to decrease their breakeven points from 7-8 weeks down to 2 weeks. By identifying which channels and campaigns break even faster, they can focus spend on the highest-velocity channels.

Optimizing ad spend by day of week

One customer used the cohort report to discover that their Google Ads never broke even on weekends. By drilling into campaign-level cohort data, they identified this pattern and reallocated ad spend to Wednesday and Thursday instead.

Result: Double-digit increase in revenue by optimizing spend timing.

Evaluating discount campaigns

A company offered a 50% discount promotion and ran it for three weeks. Using the cohort report's absolute revenue view, they analyzed total revenue generated from those three weeks.

Discovery: Despite getting more customers and more purchases, the total revenue for those three weeks was the same as any other normal week.

Outcome: Because of the discount, they didn't ultimately drive more revenue. They realized this wasn't a strategy they wanted to repeat.

Getting there

Users can access cohort reports by clicking on the "cohort" tab at the top of their screen.

If you have questions about the cohort report, please contact [email protected].