Daily Active Users (DAU)

What is considered a Daily Active User in mobile apps?

Daily Active Users (DAU) are the total number of users that interacted with your app in 24 hours. This usually only includes users that were detected within the app, and not those who clicked an ad for example. However, some types of apps might need a specific action to be performed in order to qualify a user as a DAU. An example of such an action can be “played a song” for music apps. For gaming apps, DAU are usually those who at least opened the app.

How does Tenjin calculate Daily Active Users (DAU)?

At Tenjin, Daily Active Users are calculated by simply counting the number of unique device_id’s recorded upon registering a session event for any given day.

Why should you be looking at DAU?

The number of DAU, especially if it is increasing, is a good sign that your customers are becoming more engaged with your app. Note that this metric is not a cohort metric related to the install date. Your DAU could be increasing either because the number of app installs have increased, or because the number of retained users have increased. If the number of DAU increases for your app beyond the number of app installs, this could mean that the quality of your app’s users is increasing. In other words, those who install your app are qualified users with a high intent to use your app. This is the result you should aim for. On the other hand, if you have increased the number of installs but the DAU hasn't increased proportionally, this means the quality of your users isn’t great and you might want to look into changing your target audience for your user-acquisition campaigns.

A healthy dataset should show us that when DAU increases, the retention rate and LTV should also increase. Any other result may be a cause for concern.