The daily to monthly active user ratio is a metric you should measure to show the level of daily usage per month, or stickiness, of an app.
This is, for example, one of the most valuable metrics for Facebook, as it measures the only metric in which they excel: daily active engagement. At first glance, the DAU/MAU ratio seems simple: divide daily active users by monthly active users to find out how many days per month your customers use your app.
What is daily to monthly active users ratio?
The Daily Active Users (DAU) to Monthly Active Users (MAU) ratio measures product engagement or product adherence by tracking the number of days per month that users were active within your product. This is the formula:
DAU/MAU Ratio = Daily Active Users / Monthly Active Users
The DAU/MAU ratio was first introduced by Facebook as an engagement metric. It makes a lot of sense for a platform like Facebook to track daily activity because most social apps rely on product usage that borders on addiction or obsession. That’s something to think about when you’re scrolling through your feed for hours, every day of the week.
Although the daily to monthly active users ratio is generally used in the context of consumer products, there’s nothing stopping you from tracking this metric for your B2B product. However, you may want to adjust how you define meaningful activity and fully understand your customers’ lifestyles and usage patterns before drawing conclusions based on this metric.
What is a good ratio of daily to monthly active users?
A good daily to monthly active user ratio is around 25%, with the gold standard being 50% and above. However, this is especially true for consumer companies and, more specifically, for social applications, where daily use is much more common.
Please note that benchmarks for metrics such as DAU/MAU ratio can vary greatly depending on the product’s application use cases and internal active user calculation methodologies.
Importance of knowing daily and monthly active users
This metric tells you how successful your app is, how frequent user engagement is, and the number of days in a month that users are active on your platform.
While the DAU/MAU ratio effectively measures stickiness (the likelihood that users will consistently return to your app), what you can really do is measure the true value that users get from your app.
If you think of the daily to monthly active user ratio as the percentage of users who come to your app to solve every time a particular problem arises, you have a direct view of how well your app performs the function it was designed to do.
As always, there are conditions to interpret this metric, depending on your specific context. The daily to monthly active user ratio can vary based on multiple factors, from industry to target user segment, subscription type, and average app frequency. That’s why it makes much more sense to track the percentage change in the daily to monthly active user ratio over time to get relevant data specifically for your business.
Conclusion
Identify whether the ratio of daily to monthly active users is appropriate for the frequency of use of your app. Daily usage is higher for social and messaging apps, while lower for B2B functions such as analytics, accounting, or ticket sales. Instead, you may want to track weekly active users (WAU).
Define active users by activity correlated with success rather than arbitrary actions like logins. This avoids inflating your daily to monthly active user ratio with numbers irrelevant to user value. Of course, if your app finds success through daily logins, then that’s exactly how you should define an active user.
Distinguish between freemium, trial and paid clients. You can see that your daily to monthly active user ratio increases significantly when you start focusing only on paying customers. Other metrics, such as trial conversion rate and earned customers, may be better suited for tracking your freemium and trial users.
Remember that in TuDashboard you can measure these and other UX KPIs easily and effectively through a data board or dashboard. You can view your business data in real time and analyze what is really happening in your business.