1. Active users

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‍Why using Active users

These metrics are used for years by websites and reflect the most basic way of measuring user engagement.

Active users are simple and easy to measure metrics - that adapt to most businesses.

Once a top-line metric is identified, it can be used to check and manage the health of your product.

But what is the one metric that matters most to the success of your product?

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How to define Active Users

It’s important to determine what action the user must take in your business to be “active”. It’s not the same for every business.

Is an active user one who logs on? Is it someone who takes a more specific action with your product such as reading an article?

Usually it’s better to measure a more valuable action like "Read an article" or "Share Content".

Now that you know that, what is the one metric that matters most to the success of your product?

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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.

These metrics measure the number of users who engage with your product or service over the specific period indicated.

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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 the 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: You might have a vision for your product. 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.

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