If you’re building a product or analyzing user engagement, you’ve probably encountered the terms MAU, DAU, and WAU. These acronyms stand for Monthly Active Users, Daily Active Users, and Weekly Active Users respectively, and they represent some of the most fundamental metrics in product analytics. While they might seem straightforward at first glance, understanding the nuances between them can significantly impact how you interpret your product’s health and growth.
What Are Active Users?
Before diving into the distinctions, it’s worth clarifying what we mean by “active.” An active user is someone who has engaged with your product in a meaningful way during a specific time period. What counts as meaningful engagement varies by product. For a social media app, it might be posting, liking, or commenting. For a productivity tool, it might be creating or editing a document. For a game, it could be completing a level or making a purchase.
The key is that active users aren’t just people who have accounts with you, they’re people who are actually using what you’ve built.
Daily Active Users: The Pulse of Engagement
Daily Active Users measures how many unique users engage with your product on any given day. This metric gives you the most granular view of user behavior and represents your most engaged audience segment. These are the users who find enough value in your product to return every single day.
DAU is particularly valuable for products designed for frequent use, like messaging apps, news platforms, or productivity tools. If you’re building something people should use daily, this metric directly reflects whether you’re succeeding at creating that habit. A messaging app with low DAU relative to its total user base has a serious problem, but a tax preparation app with low DAU for most of the year might be perfectly healthy.
The challenge with DAU is that it naturally fluctuates. Weekends often show different patterns than weekdays. Mondays might look different from Fridays. This variability means you need to look at trends over time rather than fixating on any single day’s number.
Weekly Active Users: The Middle Ground
Weekly Active Users counts unique users who engage with your product at least once during a seven-day period. This metric smooths out some of the daily volatility while still capturing relatively frequent engagement. WAU is particularly useful for products that aren’t necessarily designed for daily use but still aim for regular engagement.Think of a meal planning app, a fitness tracker that users check a few times per week, or a project management tool that team members consult several times weekly. For these products, WAU often provides a more meaningful picture of health than DAU would.
WAU also helps you understand the broader engaged user base beyond your power users. Someone might not use your product every single day, but if they’re coming back multiple times per week, they’re still finding real value. This metric captures that middle tier of engagement that can represent a significant portion of your active community.
Monthly Active Users: The Big Picture
Monthly Active Users measures unique users who engage with your product at least once during a 30-day period. This is the broadest measure of active engagement and often serves as the headline metric when companies report their user base size.MAU is valuable because it captures your entire engaged audience, including infrequent but real users. Someone who logs in once a month to check something specific or to use a feature they need occasionally still counts. This matters because these users represent potential growth, they’re already in your ecosystem and might increase their engagement with the right prompts or features.
For many products, especially those with utility-based value propositions, MAU provides the most complete picture of reach. A banking app, for instance, might have users who only check in a few times per month but are nonetheless highly satisfied customers.
The Relationship Between These Metrics
The real insight comes from understanding how these metrics relate to each other. The ratios between them reveal patterns about user behavior and product stickiness. A product with high DAU relative to MAU has highly engaged users who return frequently. This is often called “stickiness” and is calculated as DAU divided by MAU.For example, if you have 10,000 DAU and 100,000 MAU, your stickiness ratio is 10%. This means the average user engages with your product about three days per month. Whether that’s good or bad depends entirely on your product category and goals. A social media platform might aim for 50% or higher, while a banking app might be perfectly healthy at 15%.
Similarly, the ratio of WAU to MAU tells you about weekly engagement patterns. If your WAU is very close to your MAU, it suggests users who engage at all tend to do so within the same weekly period, which might indicate limited habit formation.
Why This Matters for Your Product
Different stages of a product’s lifecycle require focus on different metrics. In the early days, you might obsess over DAU because you’re trying to build core habits and prove that your product deserves daily attention. As you mature, MAU becomes important for demonstrating overall reach and market penetration.
The metrics also help you identify problems early. If your MAU is growing but your DAU is flat or declining, you’re acquiring users but not retaining them or keeping them engaged. If your DAU is stable but MAU is shrinking, you’re losing your broader base even as your core users remain loyal.
Understanding these distinctions also helps you avoid vanity metrics. A company might boast about having millions of monthly active users, but if only a tiny fraction use the product daily, the engagement story is very different than the headline suggests. Context matters enormously.
Choosing the Right Metric for Your Product
Not every product should optimize for the same metric. A meditation app might reasonably target daily use, while a tax software product might consider quarterly active users more relevant than MAU. The key is aligning your primary metric with your product’s natural usage pattern and value proposition.
Ask yourself: How often should someone use this product to get maximum value? That answer should guide which active user metric you prioritize. Then track all three anyway, because the relationships between them tell important stories about user behavior, product health, and growth sustainability.
Ultimately, these metrics aren’t just numbers to report to stakeholders. They’re diagnostic tools that help you understand whether you’re building something people truly need and want to use. The difference between a user who shows up once a month and one who returns every day represents the difference between casual interest and genuine product-market fit.
