Daily active users (DAU)

For a bigger picture of your app or products’ performance or growth, you need scores of your active users and their engagement patterns. With your Daily Active Users or DAU metric system, you can know how many people access your app and engage in it. Read on to find out more about DAU!

What Is DAU? 

The DAU or Daily Active Users of an app or website is a measure of the number of unique or active users that access or engage with an app or website daily (within a 24-hour window). A unique user indicates a distinct IP address or registered user.

This metric system helps you monitor and track users' engagement and usage patterns daily. The information can be helpful when predicting the app’s overall performance, the effectiveness of your app marketing campaigns, and the user’s experience.

For clearer analysis or understanding of your app’s stickiness, you should use a weekly active user (WAU) or monthly active user (MAU) metric system.

Why Is DAU So Important?

From your app’s daily onboarding figures to trends and engagements, there are several reasons to measure your DAU. Here are the top reasons why DAU is important:

User retention

A quick Google research would show you different studies on user retention for apps and websites. From these various reports, you’d see that a significant number of people (more than 50%) discontinue using an app within a week to 30 days of installing it. Such a churn rate cost app makers a significant amount of money yearly.

This is why app makers spend a lot of money on customer retention. They want to increase retention rates because it improves their app or website’s valuation. Plus, it’s cheaper and more effective than acquiring a new customer. 

Meanwhile, a DAU metric is one way to predict your app or website’s churn rate in good time and make the necessary adjustments before it’s too late. Its effectiveness lies in the fact that you get to see your active customers and their heat maps daily. So you can easily predict when their number is dropping and why.

Campaign effectiveness

After building an app, you must do several post-development activities to attract users, increase app downloads, and increase the app’s market valuation. These activities or campaigns ensure the app’s market success and great user experience.

By looking at your DAU metric, you can tell if these campaigns work or if you should try something else. Remember that nothing is guaranteed in marketing, but with constant trials and daily monitoring, you can know what works and stick to it for better results.

Trends and Patterns

DAU metrics can show your customers’ usage patterns and activities daily. While this might not give you the big picture in the grand scheme of things, compiling this information over time can offer early insight into what your users like and what you may do to improve your app’s user experience.

How to Measure and Track Daily Active Users 

Nevertheless, if you’re concerned about how to measure active users or how to calculate DAU, then Google Analytics and Apple App Analytics can help you do that at no cost.

Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

GA4 makes it pretty simple to measure your daily active user reports. Although this requires some work and careful consideration, here is how to get on the right foot:

• Sign in to Google Analytics and select the Analytics property for your app.
• On the left-hand side of the screen, select Report.

• Click on Engagement, and a list of drop-down options will appear.

• Select Overview. As the name suggests, this gives an overview of the engagements on your app, which are sorted according to various parameters. These parameters include users active over the last 30 minutes, views by page, and user stickiness.

Using the edit button at the right-hand side of the screen, you can modify these parameters and add over variables you need to determine your app’s user activity.

• If you’re okay with the current composition of variables, scroll to the “user activity over time” section to see your users' daily, weekly, and monthly activeness.

Apple’s App Analytics

Since most iOS or MacOS apps are incompatible with Google, Windows, or Android apps, you’d need Apple’s App Analytics to measure your iOS app. To do that,

• Register your app on Apple Store Connect and log in.
• If you have multiple apps registered, you should select the app you want to monitor.
• Then, head over to App Analytics. You can locate this tab on the left-hand side of the environment.
• Select Metrics → then Daily from the drop-down menu.
• Select Engagement → then Active Devices.
• While you observe the feedback, you can adjust the period range to within 24 hours for more detailed information.

What Is a Good DAU for an App?

There's no hard and fast rule concerning what a good DAU should be. However, most experts are of the opinion that a good DAU should be about 20-30% of your monthly app engagement, also known as monthly active users (MAU). However, if your MAU is exceedingly low, the DAU will be highly inconsequential. Hence, you have to put in enough work to ensure you boost your daily and monthly traffic.

How to Improve DAU

If your DAU feedback is poor, and you wish to improve it, the following tips should help you.

Use Push Notifications and In-App Messages

Personalization

Personalizing your campaigns is a sure-fire way to improve opt-in rates. A high opt-in rate shows that users agree with your email or general campaign, setting you on the right foot to increase customer retention rates and improve your app, website, or marketing campaign.

Gamification

Deep Linking

Deep linking is another amazing strategy for boosting DAU, as it improves customer experience. The idea behind deep linking is to provide users with a direct link to access relevant content or pages on your app, as opposed to scavenging through the app to get what they want.

Increasing your daily active users can be the stepping stone towards every incredible dream you have for your app. With Reteno, you can achieve this and so much more. Click here to get started.