Glossary
User properties
Attributes describing a user, such as plan tier or signup date, attached to their profile rather than to a single event.
Also called: user traits, user attributes
User properties are attributes that describe a person rather than a single action: plan tier, signup date, country, or company size, for example. They are attached to a user's profile and are available at analysis time regardless of which event is being examined, which is what separates them from event properties, which describe only the specific action they're attached to (like the amount of a single purchase).
User properties can be set once (signup date), overwritten as they change (current plan), or computed on a rolling basis (lifetime purchase count). They are defined and governed alongside events in a project's event taxonomy and listed in the tracking plan, since a property with an inconsistent name or type across platforms breaks segmentation just as an inconsistent event name does.
User properties matter because they are what makes customer segmentation and cohorting possible — without them, analysts can only slice by what happened, not by who the user is. A common pitfall is letting properties go stale, such as a "plan" property that isn't updated on downgrade, which silently corrupts every segmented report built on it; another is storing personally identifying values as plain user properties without the access controls that kind of data requires.
Last reviewed September 22, 2026