DAU & MAU as essential metrics of your mobile app
If your application is subscription-based, you must monitor critical indicators to determine user engagement, growth potential, and attrition. These metrics should also be included in the key performance indicators (KPIs) of any product or marketing team – Daily Active Users (DAU) and Monthly Active Users (MAU) (MAU).
What is DAU?
Simply explained, DAU is a metric that indicates the total number of active users on a given day. It is critical for determining how engaged your users are with your app and how much value they derive from it.
When used alone, Daily Active Users are not particularly useful for tracking performance and can easily devolve into a vanity statistic. To gain a complete picture of user engagement, you should combine it with Monthly Active Users and Cohort Analysis.
The importance of DAU/MAU
It demonstrates day-to-day changes
Tracking DAU is critical for analyzing the impact of product development — for example when a new feature is published and the Product Manager wants to evaluate how it affects usage and retention immediately following the release — in other words, the product's stickiness.
It assists in determining when people are using the app
As a result, you'll understand why people use it. For instance, a card delivery service may show daily usage increases during specific holidays, whereas social apps see daily usage at a high level every day. This enables marketing teams to comprehend their ideal clients' behavior - when and how to reach them.
Clarifies presumptions concerning user behavior
When a business is still learning about its audiences' behaviors, there may be a lot of assumptions and guesswork about what they might be like, but you'll never know for certain until you track and analyze app usage - DAU is one such metric that can assist verify or reject an assumption.
How to interpret changes in your DAU?
An increase in DAU of a large magnitude
This could be a sign that your app is undergoing 'growth' and acquiring a certain amount of stickiness among users. However, keep in mind that increases in usage may be caused by transient events (such as media coverage) and subsequently subside shortly. A consistent increase in DAU indicates that your app is gaining traction. However, examine additional indicators to verify you are not being misled.
When DAU continues to decline on a daily basis
This could be a sign that you have a churn problem. Users have abandoned your application and are unlikely to return. What is the solution? Assure that you are providing an adequate customer experience throughout the user journey and that you have a retention strategy in place. Begin by enhancing your communication with your users – by being more effective at resolving their issues and responding to them on their preferred channels.
What is a good DAU/MAU ratio?
A healthy DAU/MAU ratio varies according to the goal, brand association, audience, and engagement style of an app. For example, social apps may have higher DAU/MAU standards, as consumers often use these products on a daily basis to interact with friends, share content, and keep current on social trends. By contrast, B2B apps may have longer-term objectives, and users may access them less frequently or exclusively on weekdays. Additionally, users may utilize apps such as travel accommodation programs for only a few days each year while on vacation.
DAU and MAU may be more beneficial to some apps than others. However, in the majority of cases, a higher DAU/MAU score is preferable. This indicates that a greater number of people are interacting with an app on a daily basis. A flawless score of 100 percent indicates that users are active on an app every single day of the month. This demonstrates the use and functioning of an app in the daily lives of a typical consumer. You can set a DAU/MAU ratio benchmark based on your business's goals and ambitions.
What kind of benefits can MAU provide?
Marketing effect
Assume you've just launched a fresh user acquisition campaign for your mobile app. The campaign lasts a few months, and you must monitor its progress in accomplishing your objectives during and shortly after that time period. By MAU, a month-over-month increase in the active user rate indicates that your campaign had an effect on user acquisition. If your MAU remains constant during those months, your campaign has stalled.
User retention rate
The MAU of your app is critical for determining app retention because it indicates your active users over time. When compared to the DAU, you can observe the percentage of monthly active users who use your app on a daily basis — and are thus retained'. This is something that product managers and investors consider when determining the stickiness of a product.
So how can you be sure that your app has a solid engagement rate?
Well, after you have acquired a sufficient amount of active users that dynamically interact with your app, the next big question is - how do you engage with your users? There are a lot of approaches and methods that you can utilize and test at your will. However, you need to think a step ahead and analyze just what kind of quality tools you can use to gain maximum effect from your efforts. InAppStory provides such a toolkit that is capable of achieveing your set mobile app goals.
In fact, our tool consists of several components that create an immerisve and interactive experience for your users. Just to name a few examples, our experts offer:
- Onboarding Screens - whether it’s about your own mobile application features or relevant educational material, the onboarding sets of screens will able to provide short and impact content that every user can easily digest.
- App Stories - if you want to share valuable and informative content with other people about your own organization, then mobile Stories can also provide you with such a feature.
- Gamification - be it an interactive Candy Crash similar game or an adveture-based one, you might want to incorporate them into your mobile app. The engagement and stickiness rates will surely go up in a matter of a few months.
- Quzzies - instead of a boring survey, you can collect the necessary feedback from users through a simple and funny quiz.
As you can see, our toolkit based on SDK allows us to greatly simplify the content approach and at the same time impact your major mobile app metrics. If you want to see the full potential of the Stories feature, then try it out for FREE for an entire month. All you need to do is leave your contact details and we’ll be able to give you access within 24 hours!