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Best way to capture user age

  • 12 August 2022
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Has anyone tried tracking user age before? I have a case now where it’s relevant to capture and update their current age, and I’m wondering whether to do something clever like below, or just to brute force it and update their “current age” user property every day or session.

  • Age User Property

    • Set both their birthdate and age (at time of submission) as user properties

    • Configure derived property in Amplitude for current age (i.e. today - birthday)

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Best answer by Saish Redkar 12 August 2022, 17:36

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Hey @timothy-permutable 

I haven’t tried this before, but I would go with your derived property solution mainly for the ease and convenience involved.
One caveat which might occur in this approach -  if we are trying to analyze a user’s activity from a year ago, then the current age derived property associated with that event will reflect the users current age. So you might want to play around that a bit. But I feel this is a trivial one.

Badge +10

Hey @timothy-permutable 

I haven’t tried this before, but I would go with your derived property solution mainly for the ease and convenience involved.
One caveat which might occur in this approach -  if we are trying to analyze a user’s activity from a year ago, then the current age derived property associated with that event will reflect the users current age. So you might want to play around that a bit. But I feel this is a trivial one.

Good point. I wonder if I can create a derived event property instead then - I’ll have to see if that’s possible mixing the event props and user props at time of event.

Possibly simpler just to set year of birth at signup, use that as the group by dimension, and accept that it has a (very gradually) changing meaning over long periods of time.

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