To understand how fast your app is growing, you decide to measure your number of daily active users. Then you wake up one morning to an email from Apple: they’re going to feature you in the App Store! Things couldn’t be better. Growth is slow and steady until a couple tech blogs find your app and start talking up how great it is-suddenly you’re getting thousands of downloads every hour. Let’s say you put your social music playing app in the App Store a couple days ago. The ratio of DAU/MAU is typically a measure of ‘stickiness’ for internet products. In most cases, to be considered a “monthly active user,” a person has to open or view an app at least once in the period of one month. Monthly active users (MAU) is the aggregate sum of daily active users over a period of one month. Web and mobile app businesses typically consider DAU as their primary measure of growth or engagement. In most cases, to be considered “active,” users simply have to view or open the product. What Is Daily Active Users?ĭaily active users (DAU) is the total number of users that engage in some way with a web or mobile product on a given day. You need to connect your definition of “active” to your growth goals.īefore we really get into it, let’s get on the same page with the definition of daily active users. Otherwise, you might have a serious problem on your hands. To actually improve your product and make it supremely sticky, you need to connect your definition of “active” to your growth goals: figure out what kinds of activities and characteristics lead to retention and then build your idea of an active user around those. But according to Facebook’s stock prospectus, you don’t even need to be anywhere near Facebook to be counted as a “user.” All you have to do is interact with their third-party integrations, and that could mean anything from clicking a tiny blue thumbs up on an ESPN article or sharing a song on Spotify.Īnd this points to the real problem with measuring “active users.” Active is a functionally meaningless word.

When Facebook hit a billion active users in a day, every blog covering tech rushed to write about it. Every company that releases its DAU numbers calculates them in a different way, making them effectively useless even for comparisons between apps. You can’t do anything with a falling DAU except wonder what’s going wrong, and vice versa. If you haven’t stopped caring about vanity metrics-unique views, app downloads, registrations, etc.-you should.Ī lot of entrepreneurs have they’ve read The Lean Startup or heard about Facebook’s “7 friends in 10 days” growth hack and they’ve started to focus on metrics like daily active users (DAU).

Daily active users facebook