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Question

User Properties don't apply to some events later in stream

Hello there!

I have two events that our backend sends to Amplitude: registration and purchase. It's important to note that we always send the registration event before the purchase event. During the registration event, we send all the necessary user properties. Typically, these user properties apply to all events that come later in the event stream, as long as they refer to the same user. 

For instance, I might send a user property "is_test_user" with the registration event. Later on, if I want to view all the non-test purchases, I can filter them by looking for the purchase event where the "is_test_user" property equals zero. 

However, I recently encountered an issue where the user property wasn't applied to an event later in the stream, causing our test and production purchases to get mixed up. I'm wondering if someone could clarify when user properties apply to all later events and when they don't. 

Thank you for your assistance!

Thank you!

@Dmytro Chorntt good question, there could be a few different reasons why this is happening. Where is this data coming from? The team can troubleshoot further if we know the source.

 

In the meantime, this article is worth a read - lots of detail here about how user properties are treated in Amplitude.

@Esther Trapadoux thank you for your response!

Both events are coming from our backed via HTTP API, hope that helps!

 

 

 

Hey @Dmytro Chorntt,

Once a user property is set, its value will persist, and Amplitude will apply it to all subsequent events until the value is changed. Have a look at our documentation here. 

If you’re seeing the wrong user prop values I wonder if your user properties are getting updated by other events that you’re tracking? As it’s a recent thing, did you or your team perhaps any new events that could cause this issue?

Hey @franciskafyi 

Thank you for your reply!

Speaking of rules that govern user properties, most of our data behave exactly how described. However, we see that some of the events have issues described above.

As I see, we neither update any of the said user properties nor added any events that could.

Any way I can ask your team to look at your data?

I think that sharing a specific event id would be not appropriate here.

Thank you!

Hey @Dmytro Chorntt,

Just to confirm – this is not something that has recently started happening but it has always been the case? Because in general, user props should always persist which leads me to believe something in your taxonomy has changed. 

Another thing to check is if the user properties are correctly included where you expect them to fire – maybe someone made some changes in the codebase recently that could effect the behavior.

I see you’re a Scholarship customer, so if you want to send over the events you’re talking about to scholarship@amplitude.com we can try and take a look too, address your email to Franciska.

Thanks

Hello @franciskafyi, 

I noticed this issue a few days ago but was unable to find a solution. Thank you for bringing it to my attention. I will collect some examples and send them to the email addresses you provided.

I have the same issue. 
Some details.
We currently have a single Amplitude project where we send events from our website, iOS application, and backend.
Use case.

  1. User signed up via website with UTM tags 
  2.  we created a user id 
  3.  these (initial_utm_campaign, initial_utm_content, initial_utm_medium) user properties  were detected by Browser SDK and applied to all events from the web
  4. user installed the IOP app  and logged in with the same user id
  5. profiles were merged
  6. But all subsequent events from IOS don’t have that user properties. 

Could you please help to understand why and fix it?


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@Julia thanks for this and apologies for the delay. I’ve asked someone on the product team to jump in and help here!

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