DAU, WAU, or MAU: What does your company need to track to maximize app growth?
In this article, we’ll help you decide what engagement metrics you need to track to maximize your app’s growth, whether you have a gaming, a subscription-based, or an e-commerce app.
We recommend grabbing a pen and paper while reading this. With some simple calculations, you’ll figure out:
- How to identify your primary metric, DAU, WAU or MAU
- Who your Active Users are
- How good your numbers are compared to the industry
But before we dive in, let’s first define DAU, WAU, and MAU and how they are used in mobile app growth.
What are DAU, WAU, and MAU?
The final two letters, AU, represent an Active User.
Let’s say you have a coffee shop. You’ve got people just passing by — they are passive users. Active Users are the ones who buy your coffee.
Now, let’s add the missing letter. If your client buys your coffee daily, they will be your daily Active User (DAU). If your client buys coffee every week, they will be a weekly Active User (WAU). Finally, if they do it once a month, they will be a monthly Active User (MAU).
Sounds easy, right? It seems the more daily Active Users who buy coffee, the better. But with app metrics, it’s a bit more complicated — your WAU might be more important than your DAU.
See the questions below to help you choose the right metric for your app.
What does ‘active’ really mean?
With the coffee shop metaphor, you’re an Active User if you’ve bought coffee. With apps, it’s slightly more complex. Are you an Active User if you’re using a free plan? Or are you an Active User if you opened an app and clicked away? Read the example below to help you figure this out.
Let’s say you decided to sell coffee not only offline, but online, too. You now have an app and want it to bring you more clients.
What really matters here is the number of people ordering coffee through the app. We encourage you to consider what goal your users need to achieve to help your company grow. After you know this, ensure your Active Users help you reach it.
See some examples of companies and their ‘active’ criteria to help you define who your Active Users are:
After you’ve decided who you consider an Active User, start tracking them using your app tracking tool. Now let’s see whether DAU, WAU, or MAU should be the primary metric for your app.
How often do you expect your users to be active?
Here, you need to ask yourself how often your users should do the action you’ve come up with above.
If you have a coffee shop, and your typical client returns to you only once a month, it’s not that great. But, if you’re selling clothes, and your average user orders something monthly, this shows your business is thriving.
If you have a corporate messenger with DAU as your primary metric, you might get misleading data. You can’t expect your team to keep chatting like there are no weekends—you’ll usually see fewer messages on Saturday and Sunday.
WAU is the metric you should choose here to ensure days off and weekends don’t affect your data. See below a list of companies and the primary metrics they may have:
Now after we’ve explained how DAU, WAU, and MAU work, let’s see how you can use these numbers to help you understand how good your engagement rate is.
How good are your numbers?
A good way of measuring your app’s engagement rate is by tracking its stickiness. If your app is sticky, it means your users like your app, and your engagement rates are high.
Stickiness = (MAU/DAU) × 100
Where:
- DAU stands for daily Active Users
- MAU stands for monthly Active Users
After calculating this formula with your own metrics, you’ll have the number. But how will you know if it’s good or bad? Here are some statistics on average stickiness in different types of apps:
Generally, your goal is to get more than 20% stickiness, according to Adjust’s research. If you reach this number, your engagement rate is very high. This means your users love using your app, and you’re doing a very good job.
Before you go
It’s perfectly fine if your numbers aren’t that high yet. If you want to get better engagement rates, catch some tips for optimizing your app to grow your app stickiness:
Whatever you choose, focus on the user experience. If your users feel more comfortable using your app than the app of your competitors’, they’ll engage more, making your app more sticky.
