What Is An Active User

An active user is a person who frequently engages with your product or service over a period of time. They're your loyal customers that keep coming back.

Metrics to Track

The two most common ways to measure active users are:

• Monthly Active Users (MAU): The number of unique users who engaged with your product within the past 30 days. This shows how many people you reach in a month. This is a common metric for understanding your product's reach and market penetration. 

• Weekly Active Users (WAU): WAU counts the number of unique users who were active in your product at least once during a week. This provides a broader view of user engagement and is good for products where users may not use the product daily but still regularly. WAU is a key metric for many lifestyle and entertainment apps.

• Daily Active Users (DAU): The number of unique users who engaged with your product on a particular day. Looking at DAU over time shows how well you retain users day to day.

Why Active Users Matter

Active users drive growth and revenue. They're more likely to make purchases, subscribe to paid plans, spread word-of-mouth marketing, and provide product feedback.

Keeping close tabs on how many active users you have, which metrics are trending up or down, and what's driving those changes will help you make smart business decisions. After all, the success of your company depends on building a large, devoted base of active, lifelong customers.

How to calculate active users

There are a few common ways to calculate your active users. The most basic is to count anyone who uses your product within a given time period, like the past month. Say you have 5,000 registered users and 3,000 of them logged in this month. Your monthly active users would be 3,000.

You can also look at daily active users (DAU) or weekly active users (WAU). Maybe 1,500 people use your app every day and 2,250 use it at least once a week. Your DAU would be 1,500 and your WAU would be 2,250.

User cohorts

Another useful metric is cohort analysis, where you group users by the date they first signed up and track their activity over time. You might see that users who joined in January are still very active, while those from March don’t engage as much. This can help you figure out how to better retain new users.

The time period you analyze depends on your product. For a social network, monthly or weekly active users may be most relevant. For an ecommerce site, you may care more about users who make a purchase within 3-6 months of signing up. The metrics you choose should align with your key business goals and user lifecycle.

User stickiness: The DAU/MAU ratio 

To calculate your user stickiness, you need to track two key metrics: daily active users and monthly active users

By comparing these two numbers, you can determine your user stickiness. The formula is:

Stickiness = (Daily Active Users / Monthly Active Users) * 100

For example:

DAU: 1000

MAU: 5000

DAU/MAU = 0.2 = 20%

This metric also helps determine areas for improvement to boost user retention and loyalty. Track your DAU and MAU over time to see how stickiness changes with updates, campaigns or seasons. Make adjustments to continually improve the user experience.