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Hi Amplitude Community,

 

We are experiencing a problem in Amplitude and I’m looking forward to see your solutions for this problem.

 

As you may know, whenever the first event is sent to Amplitude for a user, automatically a new event called “New User” will be created for the user.

 

Events can be two type:

  • Active event: Action is done by user
  • Inactive event: No action is done by user but something has happened in backend that lead to generation of an event for user (for example user order status has been changed)

 

“New User” event is created whether the event is active or inactive. Creation of New User event after inactive events has led to some issues in our reporting. In our business, we may send an inactive event to amplitude for the user even if he/she has not visited our app (or website) yet. So a “New User” event will be created even if the user has not visited our platform; And here the problem arises. When we want to do analytics on New User event, we underestimate total number of the New User event. Because by definition (In general not in amplitude), a New User is the user who has first contacted with our website (or application). 

 

I am looking forward to seeing your opinion about this issue. 

 

Best Regards,

Alireza

Hi Alireza,

 

Thanks for writing in! Denis here, happy to help. 

 

Indeed, the first event a user does in their first calendar day in Amplitude would indeed be their New User event. Unfortunately, this is by design and so, we cannot change the definition of a new user. However, some possible solution is to look at possibly adding a custom user property “new” when the user visits the site for the first time and it is not an action. You could event have the inactive events have new:false for all of them if you never want to count them. You would need to add this in their first active event or first day of events, and then update the custom user property to false after a day or some other condition you may have with the Identify API. 

 

Another option is to look at sending a backfilled event to each individual which will act as their first event and then use that. Such as “Their_First_Event” and then query on that., However, you would need to backfill for each user and this could take some time.

 

I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any further questions. 

 

Kind Regards,
Denis

Just giving my two cents. I am running into a similar issue. It would be great if we could specify how we want the New User event to fire. Especially with apps and sites with unauthenticated flows, it may not make sense to understand retention and other methods using “Any Event”. 

This is especially prevalent because we use Experiment, which fires “Exposure” and makes everyone a New User, even if they are just visiting unauthenticated and they don’t do anything else in the app. It messes with all of our charts using New User and retention charts as well.  

@liukaichi thanks for this insight! I’ve submitted this feedback directly to our product team. Appreciate it! 🙏

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