DAU (Daily Active Users), WAU (Weekly Active Users), and MAU (Monthly Active Users) are metrics used to measure the frequency of user engagement with a product or service over specific time periods, providing insights into user activity patterns
The DAU, WAU, and MAU metrics are useful for gaining insight into the level of user engagement in your app. You can use them to see trends in reporting figures and inform how and when you want to run new campaigns or assess key drop-off moments in your user retention
Definitions
- Daily active users (DAU): The number of unique users that had at least one session in the app in a day.
- Mobile apps with a focus on users returning multiple times a day, such as gaming apps, use DAU.
- Weekly active users (WAU): The number of unique users that had at least one session in the app in a 7 day period.
- Use the WAU metric to avoid the variability of different days of the week in your data. For example, business-focused messaging apps like Slack will have very high DAUs Monday to Friday, and see a significant drop over the weekend. Using WAU lets you see weekly app activity without having to account for low activity on certain days.
- Monthly active users (MAU): The number of unique users that had at least one session in the app in a 30 day period.
- MAU gives you a sense of your app’s “stickiness” or general user retention level. It can be used as the basis for calculating other important metrics.
What are active users?
Active users are the individuals who meaningfully interact with a platform over a given period. Since software products are designed for different purposes, every company has a slightly different definition of “active.”
For an email automation tool, an active user might be someone who performs a series of repeated events like logging in, campaign creation, setting up schedules, checking analytics, etc., while social media apps may even consider passively scrolling an activity.
Analyzing active users with DAU, WAU, MAU metrics
Once you’ve decided on the events that make a user active, it’s time to track those events and see how many users trigger the events in the given period (e.g. day, week, month).
This section shows you what DAU, WAU, and MAU metrics mean and how to calculate them.
DAU, WAU, MAU industry benchmarks
Those are nice figures to aim for, however, note that benchmarks are industry averages, and it doesn’t mean your numbers must match 100%. It could be more or less.
What’s important is that you establish benchmarks by looking at your own numbers. Compare yourself today with what you had yesterday instead of an average industry figure.
Every company is different. Regularly track your numbers and decide what to improve
FAQs
Why should you measure user engagement with active user metrics?
Perhaps you’re wondering if there’s any point in tracking the active user metrics and if it makes any real difference.
The short answer: regular tracking helps you gauge business health at every point in time. With that information, you can decide on your next action steps.
Specifically, here are three vital reasons to track active user metrics:
User engagement score?
The user engagement score lets you measure the depth of engagement among your users. Track it to analyze highly-engaged users and identify the reasons behind their deep engagement levels. You can use the insights you generate from this exercise to deploy strategies that boost engagement among less active users.
The process of calculating the engagement score requires some learning, but stick around, and you’ll get it.
Firstly, you need to identify the important engagement events on your app. This could be product usage frequency, account renewals, or specific feature engagement. Then assign each event an engagement score between 1 and 10 to show the level of importance.
Get the number of each event from your analytics software and calculate the total event value by multiplying the first two columns.
Now you’re ready to compute the engagement score for each user. Simply add up the total event values, and you have your engagement score.
