Well this is all stuff that is completely customizable to your needs, but what I do is the following:
1./3. I'm not sure if your #1 and #3 are the same thing... wouldn't "signing up" the first time be a registration? Or are you speaking in terms of first time purchase or newsletter sign up, etc?
Technically the following can apply to both:
As part of the registration flow (sign ups) I have a serialized event that I pass the first 20 characters of the user GUID to (to make sure it only ever fires once for that user) (Event serialization only takes up to 20 characters, but the odds of having it repeat is small enough to be an acceptable risk)
In case you are unfamiliar with "serialization"... in your events admin setup, you have the following options:
- Always Record
- Record Once Per Visit
- Use Event ID
This is the last option: "Use Event ID".. by passing unique id to the event, and subsequent call using the same id will be ignored (this just helps protect from over counting my registrations)
More info: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/analytics/admin/admin-tools/success-events/success-event.htm...
If I wanted to track first time purchases, I could use another serialized event using the user guid... while this would send on every purchase, because it's the same user guid, every additional purchase would be ignored... also make sure you have a standard non-serialized event to track every purchase, or every successful login, etc... this is all up to you to determine what you need and what metrics and dimensions you need.
2. While the user is logged into my site, I use eVars to track the user GUID and the logged in Status of the user. Since I may still know who the user is, but they may have timed out... I want to know both pieces of information... You can also use "Visitor Level" attribution on your eVar.. I tend not to do this, cause I am concerned about shared devices (I work for a news organization, so our site could be accessed frequently from libraries and other shared devices, and we wanted to make sure we weren't tracking that incorrectly... Depending on your business, this may be less of a concern...
Good luck.
