User Property
A persistent attribute attached to a user profile that describes who they are, such as their subscription plan, account creation date, company size, or lifetime revenue.
Also known as: person property, user attribute, profile property
Why It Matters
User properties define who your users are, while events define what they do. Together, they let you answer questions like "do enterprise customers use this feature differently than startups?" or "which pricing plan has the highest engagement?"
User properties enable segmentation, which is the foundation of effective analytics. Average metrics across all users hide critical differences. Your overall churn rate might look healthy, but when you segment by company size, you might discover that small businesses churn at 3x the rate of enterprises. Without user properties, these distinctions are invisible.
User properties also persist across time, giving you a stable profile that accumulates context. As users interact with your product over months or years, their profile grows richer - capturing their plan changes, feature adoption, support interactions, and revenue contributions in a single unified view.
Industry Applications
A subscription box company uses user properties like "subscription_tier," "dietary_preferences," and "months_subscribed" to segment retention analysis. They discover that users who set dietary preferences during signup have 30% lower churn.
A data visualization tool tracks user properties including "role" (analyst, manager, executive) and "integrations_connected." They find that users with 3+ integrations have near-zero churn, making integration adoption a key onboarding goal.
How to Track in KISSmetrics
Set user properties in KISSmetrics using the identify and set calls. Properties persist on the user profile and are available for segmentation across all reports. Use Populations to create dynamic segments based on property combinations (e.g., "enterprise plan AND signed up in the last 90 days"). The People tab lets you browse individual profiles with all their properties.
Common Mistakes
- -Confusing user properties (persistent attributes) with event properties (contextual metadata on individual events)
- -Not updating user properties when they change - a user who upgrades should have their plan property updated
- -Storing derived metrics as user properties instead of calculating them from events
- -Creating user properties from unreliable data sources that lead to stale or incorrect profiles
Pro Tips
- +Establish a core set of user properties that every team agrees on: plan, signup date, industry, company size, lifecycle stage
- +Use KISSmetrics set-once properties for values that should never change (like original acquisition source)
- +Combine user properties with behavioral events for powerful segments: "enterprise users who have not logged in for 14 days"
- +Sync user properties from your CRM or billing system to keep analytics profiles current without manual instrumentation
- +Track property change events (plan_changed, role_updated) to analyze transitions and their impact on behavior
Related Terms
Event Property
A piece of metadata attached to a tracked event that provides additional context, such as the product name on a "purchase" event, the plan type on a "subscription started" event, or the search query on a "search performed" event.
Identified User
A user whose identity is known through a unique identifier such as an email address, user ID, or account number, allowing their behavior to be tracked across sessions and devices.
People Tracking
An analytics approach that ties every event and interaction to an individual person rather than to anonymous sessions or pageviews, enabling full lifecycle analysis and person-level insights.
Identity Graph
A database that maps and connects all known identifiers for a single person - such as email addresses, device IDs, cookie IDs, and phone numbers - into a unified profile that represents one real human.
Data Taxonomy
A hierarchical classification system that organizes analytics data into logical categories, defining how events, properties, and metrics relate to each other and to business concepts.
See User Property in action
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