How do you measure the volume of users who are accessing your game or mobile app. In the industry there are a few abbreviations and measurements that are important for any app developer or game designer to understand. These are DAU, WAU and MAU. Respectively they stand for:DAU :
- Daily Active Users
- WAU : Weekly Active Users
- MAU : Monthly Active Users
While these metrics are very similar - it is important to track each individually. During this post we will explain why that is. Let’s look at at how each is important to understand the health of your application.
DAU : Daily Active Users
Your DAU is your most important statistic to understand the immediate demand and interest in your app. This metric measures out how many users access your app on a daily basis.
If the same users access your app more than once on a single day - then they are only counted once towards your DAU totals. This distinction is important. if you are looking for an assessment of how many people are actively playing your game at a given time (regardless of how many times they have played that day) then you would be more interested in understanding your level of concurrents.
Having an accurate DAU is important as it allows you to make critical calculations when it comes to data storage. Often data storage needs are based off of the total number of users you have playing a particular game. This is once again in contrast to the concurrent number of players you have playing at one time - which would dictate more about your throughput capacity needs — or how much data you need to move between your servers at one time.
An accurate DAU is also important to help in noticing immediate trends or issues within your game. For example if you launch a new feature or release new code, what kind of an effect does it have on your immediate DAU? If it changes it for the worse - there may be an issue within the app. The one caveat to this comparison is that there will be natural differences when comparing to the previous 24 hour period. This is because your app will see ups and downs depending on the day of the week. For example some apps will see more traffic on the weekends, while others may see less. To account for this we always recommend that you view your DAU statistics comparing both the 24 hour prior as well as the same 24 hour period one week ago. Meaning if you are looking at Saturday’s DAU, examine both Fridays and the Saturday’s prior to get an accurate assessment of statistic health.
WAU : Weekly Active Users
Your WAU is very similar to your DAU however it is measured on a weekly basis instead of a daily basis. The critical differentiator here between DAU and WAU is that it is able to take the variances between day-of-the-week out of the picture. Meaning some of your users may not be able to spend time on your app on Monday, whereas others don’t have a chance during the weekend, etc. Your WAU allows you to see how many users are playing your app on weekly basis regardless of the day of the week.
Your WAU stat is also a very good indicator of your long term trends. Above when we looked at DAU trends we mentioned that an immediate comparison of 24 hours vs the prior 24 hours can result in false positives. The benefit of the WAU statistic is that this is now taken out of the picture. When comparing your week long statistics of actively playing users, you can safely compare them to the week prior and be confident that you are not seeing any variances due to the particular day of the week. For this reason the WAU statistic is often used to measure trend lines within an app and get an accurate representation of whether or not the app is growing, declining or in a flat growth state.
MAU : Monthly Active Users
MAU is the same as DAU and WAU - with one difference. Yep you guessed it. MAU measures the monthly active users and not the daily or weekly. MAU statistics are the ones that are used the most commonly when sharing information across the industry and in a public manner. This is because MAU has the least amount of variance in it when compared to the DAU and WAU counter parts.
MAU also speaks closer to the length of a players lifespan within games. A lot of mobile based games will report an average player lifespan within a game of anywhere between 60-90 days. For this reason MAU is the closest stat to represent 1 single user across its lifespan within a game.
The MAU statistic has the least amount of variance in it and is often used to represent the true health of a game or mobile application. Often with advertisers rates will be dependent upon an applications MAU statistic. An applications DAU statistic (and even their WAU can easily be artificially inflated if needed with a promotion or advertising blast. However this is a little more challenging to do on the Monthly perspective as it is likely that you would not want to wait almost 60 days before performing the same user blast.
Immediacy vs Variance
At the end of the day, the statistic that is used depends greatly on what type of stat you need. If you need an immediate representation of health to verify a release of new code or the introduction of a new feature, then DAU is your best friend. If you are watching trends and performing growth analysis, WAU is your best friend. if you are negotiating advertising deals and trying to convey the strength and health of your app, then MAU is your friend.
