I want to track a simple subscription product with Google Analytics and need to determine how to best track (a) User State, and (b) Subscription conversion rate.
At any given time, a user can be a:
- Guest: Logged out
- Member: Logged in, but not on a paid subscription
- Subscriber: On a paid subscription
I plan to track this using a session-level Custom Dimension ("User State"), whose value changes when the user moves from one category to another.
Additionally, non-Subscribers can purchase a subscription at any point. This will be registered through an event ("Purchased Plan") tied to a Goal.
My questions are:
- Should I use a hit-level, session-level or user-level custom dimension for User State?
- If using a session-level or user-level dimension, how do I deal with the case of users logging out mid-session and their entire activity being classified as "Guest"? For example, a "Subscriber" views 20 pages, then logs out, which immediately puts the entirety of that session as a "Guest" session.
- When I look at the "Purchased Plan" conversion rate, how can I exclude existing subscribers from the denominator in order to get a clean rate?
For this last case, I thought of using an advanced segment configured to "Include Users with User Type = Guest or Member" and then look at the conversion rate for this segment.
But users that purchase a subscription are immediately changed into User State = Subscriber, so the entirety of their activity (in a session-level or user-level) scoped custom dimension would be classified as such, rendering my advanced segment worthless (i.e. the user's activity will not be present in that segment).
The other option would be to set User State to hit-level scope instead, so that I can discriminate the user's activity before and after the subscription event.
How can I deal with this situation? Any help will be greatly appreciated.