[davidbnewquist]

Despite seeming a little jargon heavy, I was able to distill out few useful ideas.

For example, say you're considering a cool new CAPTCHA for your registration page. The article would advise doing an "A/B split test" before phasing out the old CAPTCHA.

Such a test would involve creating an alternate registration page with the new CAPTCHA, and randomly directing x% of users to the alternate page. You could then obtain registration completion % from both groups, which would drive your decision to switch to fully switch to the new CAPTCHA.

[jfarmer]

Why is cohort analysis a buzzword? It's a specific technique for doing longitudinal studies.