Monthly Active Users (MAU)
Date created: Aug 28, 2020 • Last updated: Aug 28, 2020
What is Monthly Active Users?
Monthly Active Users are the number of unique users of an application or platform that have interacted with it in a month. This metric is used to track monthly user engagement. Monthly Active Users includes both new users and existing users who have interacted with the application.
Formula
How to calculate
If, out of the 200 users of an application, 100 unique users interacted with it in a month then the MAU for that month is 100. This means that 50% of the users engaged with the application in that month.
Monthly Active Users
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What is a good Monthly Active Users benchmark?
The Monthly 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 MAU.
More about this metric
Monthly Active Users refers to the number of unique users of an application that have actively engaged with it at least once in a month. 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 monthly include financial applications that support monthly financial planning and reporting processes, and supply chain applications that enable monthly forecasting and planning.
The Monthly Active User metric indicates the stickiness of an application with individual users. Low or declining user activity can be an early warning sign of potential churn, because it can indicate that users are not using the application often enough to receive ongoing value from it.
It is important to differentiate between tracking the monthly active users and monthly 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.
Tracking MAU can bring value by highlighting the activities or features of an application that get used regularly, therefore bringing value to the customer. Conversely, tracking those features of the application that are determined to be the most useful can help predict future retention and churn.
