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for Marketers

Understanding DAU, WAU & MAU metrics

The DAU, WAU, and MAU metrics are useful for gaining insight into the level of user engagement in your app. You can use them to see trends in reporting figures and inform how and when you want to run new campaigns or assess key drop-off moments in your user retention.

Definitions

Daily active users (DAU): The number of unique users that had at least one session in the app in a day.
- Mobile apps with a focus on users returning multiple times a day, such as gaming apps, use DAU.
Weekly active users (WAU): The number of unique users that had at least one session in the app in a 7 day period.
- Use the WAU metric to avoid the variability of different days of the week in your data. For example, business-focused messaging apps like Slack will have very high DAUs Monday to Friday, and see a significant drop over the weekend. Using WAU lets you see weekly app activity without having to account for low activity on certain days.
Monthly active users (MAU): The number of unique users that had at least one session in the app in a 30 day period.
- MAU gives you a sense of your app's "stickiness" or general user retention level. It can be used as the basis for calculating other important metrics.

Note:

DAU, WAU, and MAU are calculated based on UTC calendar days in Adjust, not 24 hour periods.

Metric calculations

Timeframe as a specific date

If you select a single date for the DAU, WAU, or MAU metrics, Adjust will display data showing the exact number of unique users in the previous 1, 7, or 30 day period.

Jan 31: DAU

Jan 31: WAU

Jan 31: MAU

Timeframe as a date range

If you instead pick a date range, for example January 1 - 31, Adjust will display the number of unique users in the previous, 1, 7, or 30 day period based on the daily average from that date range. This means that each day's data is based on an average, and the total for the date range is the average of each of those days.

Jan 1-31 DAU

Jan 1-31 WAU

Jan 1-31 MAU

Examples when using a date range

To calculate the WAU for a time period of Jan 1-5, you take the number of unique users from the preceding 7 days for each of the 5 days in your selected time period. You then calculate the average.

To calculate the MAU for a time period of Jan 1-5, you take the number of unique users from the preceding 30 days for each of the 5 days in your selected time period. You then calculate the average.

When to use the metrics

To know how to set up your date dimension correctly for the DAU, WAU, and MAU metrics, you need to ask what objective you are trying to solve.

Objective: Exactly how many active users did I have in my app last month?

To know the exact number of users you had in your app over a specific time period, you need to use the specific date dimension with the appropriate metric.

So, in this example for January, you should use the MAU metric and set the date as the 31st of the month.

A representation of the metric picker and the correct date selection for MAU metric showing users in that month.

Objective: How do the number of users in my app trend over time?

To see the trending numbers for your app over time, use a longer time window to see the moving averages.