Tracking Signups Correctly Client-Side


Hi there,

I’ve been using Amplitude for years but we’ve always had a hard time tracking successful user signups and relied on adjacent events to approximate it, like whether they’ve seen our onboarding page. However, there are many flows through which someone could sign up on our site and it would be better to have a clear event for signups. I’m wondering if there’s a popular pattern for accomplishing this?

A few options I’ve thought of:

  • Including a query param after the signup redirect like “?signup=true” and then detect this to trigger a “Signup Complete” event
  • Pass down some sort of attribute from the backend if this is a new user and then use that to trigger a similar event
  • Have new users go through some sort of /signup/success page that is only used for tracking (we do this for payments atm)
  • Some sort of server-side tracking or event to populate Amplitude on the backend (I think this is possible in Mixpanel but I’ve never tried it with Amplitude?)

I guess maybe a meta-question would be whether there is another way to approximate this event based on the identify API, since theoretically Amplitude should “know” if this is a new user based on when they were first identified (by ID/email). 


3 replies

Userlevel 6
Badge +9

Thank you for posting here @jacobsimon I was able to find some related articles by running a search in the community. Please keep me posted if you stumble upon anything else and make progress.

 

Userlevel 4
Badge +7

Hey @jacobsimon,

All the four options you’ve described are feasible instrumentation on the Amplitude platform. To put things simpler, you can think of tracking new users either by a specific event (“Sign Up”), event properties or user properties. Sever-side tracking/back-end events can be sent via our HTTP or Batch API.

> I guess maybe a meta-question would be whether there is another way to approximate this event based on the identify API, since theoretically Amplitude should “know” if this is a new user based on when they were first identified (by ID/email).  

I’m not quite sure what you mean by “approximate this event based on the identify API” - could you elaborate? The Identify API’s use case is to update user properties - so if you are thinking of tracking new users via a user property, you can update their profile using the Identify API without sending an explicit event. 

 

Userlevel 6
Badge +9

Thanks @ning.chang 😀

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