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I have a custom dimension user and metrics like visit_duration, action_a, action_b.

--------------------------------------------------------
|     user     |  visit_duration | action_a | action_b |
---------------+-----------------+----------+----------+
|    guest     |       1:30      |    7     |    12    |
---------------+-----------------+----------+----------+
|   reg user   |       3:50      |    12    |    41    |
---------------+-----------------+----------+----------+
| premium user |       7:15      |    32    |    101   |
--------------------------------------------------------

What happens with the data of a user that had status guest and now has status reg user?

Which average data will it effect?

Will all the data from this user move to reg user or will they be split into data that was tracked while this user had status guest and data that is tracked while he has status reg user?

Or is my approach, to track different user groups totally wrong?

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  • Maybe the title is a little bit confusing, I would appreciate a better edit :)
    – Jurik
    Commented Jul 30, 2014 at 14:08
  • 1
    I tried, feel free to modify if it's off in some way.
    – dan ♦
    Commented Jul 31, 2014 at 0:43

1 Answer 1

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You are tracking how all registered and all unregistered users behave, not how individual users behave.

A user changing from one group to another will change which group any data collected from that user falls into.

It would simply not make sense to change the previous data collected since the way they behaved when unregistered is an example of how an unregistered user behaves, and not an example of how a registered user behaves. How he behaves when registered is how a registered user behaves.

It's like someone changing football teams - the goals they scored for their old team don't then count as goals for the new team.

As such, I'm pretty confident Google will not move or change any previous data if they detect a user has changed in status.

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  • Thank you. That means the metrics are bound to the dimension and not to the user. So if the user changes its dimension, he'll collect new metrics for this new dimension.
    – Jurik
    Commented Jul 31, 2014 at 13:10
  • 1
    That's how it should be working, as long as the dimension is set correctly. There is a case here which is similar: developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/platform/…
    – RichardB
    Commented Jul 31, 2014 at 13:25

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