Measuring the stickiness of your product with the active users insight
All products, no matter how successful they are, need to constantly be tweaked and improved in order to stay ahead of the competition. One way to measure it is by looking at how sticky your product is.
‘Active Users’ insight from Stormly can help you do just that. This metric measures how many people are using your product on a regular basis. Knowing how sticky your product is can help you make decisions about where to focus your efforts and improve your product’s user experience.
First thing to keep in mind is that the “daily active users” metric indicates how many users interact with a product on a daily basis.
Some consider it a vanity metric that doesn’t relate directly to more important product goals, such as retention and engagement. However, we believe it’s still something you want to keep an eye on. Sudden changes in daily active users can indicate problems in different areas, such as marketing acquisition, or more technical ones.
Active usage can also be used to measure the stickiness of your product, which is essential if you want to grow users over time. A product that is not sticky, will lose users in the long run, because they’re not coming back after using it once. Basically, you have a leak bucket that needs to be fixed!
DAU / WAU / MAU?
You may have seen these funny sounding acronyms before. Here’s what they mean:
- DAU: Daily active users. The amount of users who visit your website or interact with your product on a daily basis.
- WAU: Weekly active users. Same, but for active users on a weekly basis.
- MAU: You’ve guessed it- monthly active users! How many users interacted with your product in a given month?
These metrics are likely to behave differently for consumer products and, say, for B2B SaaS products. As long as you know that it varies wildly by product type and industry.
When looking at consumer products, and daily usage such as for social apps, DAU is the better metric to keep an eye on. But for B2B SaaS products, which might be used only once per week, WAU would be a better metric to benchmark.
How do you define an active user?
Now that you know more about the basic active user metrics, how does your product actually define an active user?
With Stormly you can simply pick the events that define an active user. For example, for a music streaming app, you want to say that only people that play a song are active. Or you can go even deeper, and limit those that only play a song of at least 2 minutes in length and is of the jazz genre.
In the example below, we define an active user as anyone who played a song or shared a song:
Because active users contain both new users and returning users, Stormy lets us decide if we want to filter out new users. In this example, we don’t want that, but if we do, it will count only returning users as active.
For our music streaming app, we can see part of the active users’ insight below:
It shows the total for today, yesterday, last 7 days and last 30 days, including the charts for DAU, WAU and MAU.
One of the benefits of using Stormly is that any insight can be filtered and segmented according to your needs, with just a few clicks. In the example below, we’re interested in active users from our Instagram campaign, and compare between active users from the United States and France.
Ratios of active users, aka getting away from vanity
While DAU, WAU and MAU are all absolute counts, we can divide one of them by another to get ratios. For example, the DAU / MAU ratio, which represents the number of monthly active users that interact with your product or website on a daily basis.
This measure was popularized by Facebook, and is used as a primary indicator of how sticky your product is. The higher this ratio, the more your users are engaged with your product. It’s an important measure, because it shows how many people need your product, and can’t do without it on a regular basis.
The DAU / MAU ratio averages across all industries between 10% and 15%. But it wildly fluctuates for different product types. For B2C social apps such as Facebook, it’s at least 50%. While for B2B SaaS products, a ratio of 15% would be considered very decent.
Our music streaming app has a relatively low DAU / MAU ratio, which fluctuates per day of the week, but is hovering around 4%:
As we can see, there’s a lot of work to be done still to make this music streaming app more sticky! To help with that, have a look at the [aha moment/journey article].
Other ratios available in the insight are DAU / WAU, which is the percentage of weekly users that use the app daily, and WAU / MAU, which is the percentage of monthly users that use the app on a weekly basis. Enough metrics so that we can compare active usage for all kinds of possible usage patterns and product types.
Now that you’ve covered the basics of getting to know your active users, it’s time to dive deeper and see how you can forecast and detect anomalies in your product’s active usage.
We’ve covered the basics of active users and why they matter. Now it’s time to put this knowledge into practice! Sign up for our platform today and see how you can improve your product in seconds. Our easy-to-use interface will help you get started quickly, so you can focus on making your product sticky and keeping those active users coming back for more. Thanks for following along – we hope this has been helpful!