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Hi all.

we have the issue of very high numbers of new customers – numbers that we don’t see in App Store nor Mixpanel. Last year we tried to solve this issue with RC support, but failed. We did make some changes around how we call logout method but it didn’t help. Now, we’re hoping maybe someone from the community has/had the same/similar issue and could help us.

 

We already saw that there are a couple of posts around the topic:

The answers on them didn’t help us. 

 

Our iOS setup is as follows:

  • We call configure in didFinishLaunchingWithOptions with no appUserId
  • Until user logs is we rely on RC anonymousID
  • Once user logs in we call login with our userID
    • It’s also possible that user buys a subscription without being logged in, and in that case we also call login but with yet another id
    • A user can have 1, 2 or 3 aliases in RC (until logout when they get more)
  • If user logs out we call logout
    • In Mixpanel we see that on average we have 40 logouts daily
  • We also call restorePurchases on Restore purchases button but also on logging in
    • I believe on logging in we call it since it should make sure that the aliases get merged (we’re using the legacy transferring, and here syncPurchases was making us troubles as merging was not happening)

This is how the downloads look on the App Store side (we know that we can’t map 1 to 1 the downloads to RC new customers, but it should still pain the picture):

 

And this is how the numbers look for new customers on RC:

 

In Jun 30 we have 80k new customers users on iOS – that’s far from the numbers we see in App Store 1.2k (and also in Mixpanel). And every so often we see such high numbers.

One association we see is that whenever users interact with In-app messages sent from Iterable we get this raise in RC new customers. But we don’t see anything in the logs. And we can’t reproduce this issue ourselves.

Recently we started seeing this issue on Android as well, but there could be a different cause.

 

Does anyone have any idea what we could change, what the issue could be, anything really? How would you try to solve this issue?

 

Thank you in advance.

I forgot to explicitly mention, when we have the raise in new customers, we see a raise of anonymous users.

One approach we are trying is going through these users and trying to find them in Mixpanel since our every RC user should also have the Mixpanel distinctID (and vice versa). However, we can’t find the users in Mixpanel.

We noticed so far sort of 3 different groups of anonymous users. For all users first & last date/time opened are the same and that’s the only customer history we see. But the groups are:

  • No attributes at all – which is weird as we always set attributes when configuring revenue cat. What could this mean? That the user was not created from the iOS client (but we do see platform as iOS).
  • Mixpanel distinctID is Mixpanel’s anonymous ID and we can’t find the user by it in Mixpanel
  • Mixpanel distinctID is our userID which users get once they are logged in – which could mean that logged in user somehow generated an anonymous user? We still can’t find this user in Mixpanel

The fact that we see only first & last opened in customer history which are the same and that we can’t find these users in Mixpanel is making us assume that they are these anomaly users, but we don’t know for sure as we still don’t understand which characteristics the anomaly anonymous users have.

Hope this also helps.

New finding: No attributes at all and the same first & last date/time opened happens if user logs out. I was just now able to reproduce it. See the screenshot.

 

 

So, we could conclude this type of users is just regular if you have logout and they never open the app again.

However, if they open the app again, the attributes get assigned and the Mixpanel distinctID as well. And in our testing, we can find the Mixpanel user by this distinctID. First & last opened stay the same tho – last opened never changes it seems (at least for this type of user – logged out and opened the app again afterwards).

Hi @lethef,

Thank you for the very detailed question! And I’m sorry we could not figure it out from support.

I think the main issue comes from the logout, as you correctly mention logging out a user will create a new anonymous user. Here’s the full documentation about it but if you want 

After the user is logged in with a known App User ID, they may want to logout or switch accounts on your application - logout and then login with a different known ID. However, calling logout in the SDK will result in an anonymous App User ID being created. Simply do not logout the SDK. In the case of switching accounts, you can call login when the user logs in to the different account with their new App User ID.

 

We do not recommend doing it and it’s better to just log in a new user when you have the new id.

Hi @joan-cardona,

Thank you for the answer.

But as mentioned we see around 40 logouts daily. Let’s say those users never get merged, that would be + 40 new customers daily, yet we at times see 80k new customers. This doesn’t really add up. Unless I’m not seeing something?

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