Daily Active Users (DAU)
Date created: Aug 28, 2020 • Last updated: Aug 28, 2020
What is Daily Active Users?
Daily Active Users are the number of unique users of an application or platform that have interacted with it in a day. This metric is used to track daily user engagement. Daily Active Users includes both new users and existing users who have interacted with the application.
Formula
How to calculate
If, out of the 100 users of an application, 20 unique users interacted with it on a particular day then the DAU for that day is 20. This means that 20% of the users engaged with the application in a single day.
Daily Active Users
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What is a good Daily Active Users benchmark?
The Daily Active Users metric varies widely based on factors such as application type, user type, and application purpose. It is therefore more important to consider the context and look at desired target level of activity and trends over time, rather than trying to identify a benchmark for DAU.
More about this metric
Daily Active Users refers to the number of unique users of an application that have actively engaged with it at least once in a day. An active user can be a paying or non-paying user, for example, taking part in a free trial. Unique users can be identified by a username, an email, or a user id.
Frequency of application usage can vary depending on the nature of the application, the context of usage, and the role of the user. In general, examples of applications used daily include social and instant messaging, calendars, mail, and games.
The Daily Active User metric indicates the stickiness of an application with individual users. Sudden changes in daily usage trends can be an early warning sign of potential churn, because it can indicate that a technical issue may have occurred.
It is important to differentiate between tracking the daily active users and daily active accounts of an application because users are a subset of accounts, for most SaaS applications. Analyzing active users can highlight how valuable the application is to multiple unique users of an account as opposed to just the account level engagement.
Since DAU is such a granular level of usage tracking, it can highlight the activities or features of an application that get used daily, therefore bringing value to the customer. Conversely, tracking adoption of the features of an application that are determined to be the most useful can help predict future retention and churn.
