Improving User Preference Tracking for Consistent Data in Mixpanel

·Apr 22, 2025 05:45 PM·

Hi, is there any better way to get a consistent number regarding how many of my users have permanently selected one choice over another? I've tried multiple solutions and each of them provide me a wildly different answer. Ideally, I should be able to answer a question like "Out of all of our users that use the app every day, how many of them prefer X over Z theme?" It isn't in our best interest to track every single theme change as a user property, because that would create chaos in the data over time, and bloat the app. I wish I could simultaneously use the 'last segment' breakdown and use a custom denominator, or a cohort where there was an option to select 'choose the most recent value'. Any thoughts? I've been struggling with this for at least a year in Mixpanel, and no solution is really good enough 😕

3 comments

· Sorted by Oldest

Saleh N.
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If you were using Segment this would be a piece of cake. I’m not sure I follow why having a single user trait storing the last theme would lead to chaos. I presume your product would store this anyways in the user profile?
Iva Đ.
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hey Saleh N. thanks for engaging! We do use Segment, mainly for server-side identify and group calls, less so for the client-side changes. At some point, we tried using Functions in Segment to extract display-related event properties into user traits, but it ended up requiring too much regular upkeep between engineering teams. Did you have something else in mind? Regarding our setup, we move fast so our design iterations happen frequently. We tend to ship, test, and adjust based on how most users respond (whether they switch back to a legacy design or not). Just about every feature, subfeature, and subpage has its own toggle so users can switch between different views. With the range of our user roles, permissions, and experiences, it would get overwhelming to create a new user property for every UI variation (and imagine when not all users have access to those 😅 )
Saleh N.
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Iva Đ. we run Segment on our mobile app as well as our BE, and having traits from both FE and BE helps build a unified picture. Usually I try to keep FE focused on event-data, hence setting a Segment trait to the last value of an event property (e.g. theme) is straightforward. Do your users have one theme setting (global) or is it page/screen/section specific? Where is this information stored for product?

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