DAU, WAU, MAU stand for Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Active Users.
It is the number of users who are "active" within a given amount of time.
How to define Active Users
It’s important to determine what actions users must take in your product to be considered “active”.
Is an active user one who logs in? Is it someone who takes a more specific action such as reading an article?
Usually, it’s better to measure a more valuable action like "Read an article" or "Share Content".
Make sure to choose an action that represents the core of your product.
Three User Engagement Metrics: DAU, WAU, MAU
It's very common for organizations to track daily active users (DAU), weekly active users (WAU), and monthly active users (MAU).
DAU is the number of unique users who did some action each day.
WAU measures the unique users who completed an action each week.
MAU is the number of unique users who completed an action within a month.
Which one to pick
Is it better to track daily active users (DAU), weekly active users (WAU) or monthly active users (MAU)?
Generally, all these metrics are correlated. Picking any one of them would be reasonable.
There are three considerations for picking the right metric:
1️⃣ Vision for the product: How do you envision your product usage, and how will that change over time? Do expect weekly product usage? If so, WAU would be the best metric to drive success.
2️⃣ Current product usage: How are people actually using your product right now? If people are using your product many times a day, then it makes sense to select DAU.
3️⃣ The competition: How are competitors’ products used? Do people use competitors’ products on a daily basis but your product is used on a weekly basis? If so, use DAU as the metric because your product will not succeed in the competitive environment if people are engaging it with less.
DAU/MAU Ratio
Stickiness is generally calculated as the ratio of Daily Active Users to Monthly Active Users.
It represents the number of monthly customers who interact with your product or service daily.
This number is important because the repeated customers are dedicated to your product. They will help propel growth.
A number that’s over 20 percent is usually viewed as solid performance. A DAU/MAU ratio of 50% would mean that the average user of your app is using it 15 out of 30 days that month.
Why Active users
These metrics have been used for years by websites because it's the most basic way of measuring user engagement.
Once a top-line metric is identified, it can be used to check and manage the health of your product.
How to use the Active Users template
Once you sign up to June and connect Segment we automatically generate an Active Users report for you. To do so we consider active all the users that perform any of your events.
You can customize the setup if you wish to, choosing a more demanding condition to determine whether a user is active or not or by narrowing down the audience.
Make your colleagues aware of how your product is performing by sending the graph in your Slack channel.
How active users are counted
A user is active if they triggered an identify call and a page event or a track event. Identify alone are not enough to be counted as active.