The objective of this capstone project is to generate hypotheses about which demographic and behavioral segments are correlated with user retention, to test these hypotheses using the tools available within Google Analytics, and to produce actionable reports useful to Marketing and/or Product departments aiming to increase user retention and ultimately grow the user base. Students will gain facility with Google Analytics, will exercise their data analysis and visualization skills, and will find ways to effectively, succinctly, and creatively communicate results to other departments within a firm. 

The first milestone entails gaining familiarity with a community forecasting platform before producing a table of variables hypothesized to be positively or negatively correlated with user retention across a 12-week period in the life of the platform, along with brief explanations of why these relationships might exist. The second milestone requires a dive into the different types of user and session-level segmentation made possible by Google Analytics, followed by creation of a more refined table of variables to be tested, as well as plausible means for creating segments able to test these variables. The third milestone calls for creating these segments within Google Analytics and analyzing the resulting retention data while keeping careful record of which variables did or did not correlate with retention, and while using these results to fine-tune the first set of segments to run a second set of analyses. The fourth milestone is a final report to include visualizations of data pulled directly from Google Analytics, as well as plots of data generated from the segmentation analyses. 

This report will home in on the most salient, surprising, and actionable results from the segmentation analyses, will consider why these variables were or were not correlated with retention, and will offer suggestions to both Marketing and Product departments on ways they might make use of the results from the analyses.