What are Monthly Active Users (MAUs)?
Learn why monthly active users (MAUs) are crucial for product success. Understand how to track them, increase MAUs, avoid common pitfalls, and use MAUs for growth.
Being able to pinpoint what exactly makes users come back month after month is what separates businesses that thrive from those that fade into obsolescence.
Luckily, there’s a key metric you can track over the long term that helps you find out what’s making your users click with your application or SaaS solution. We’re talking about monthly active users (MAUs).
In this article, we’ll explain why the MAU metric is so important and why tracking it as a lagging indicator might help you create user experiences that delight your customers and keep them hooked.
We’ll cover:
What MAU is and how it’s different from DAUs and WAUs
Reasons why you should be tracking MAUs
A quick guide to get you started with MAU tracking
Some tips for increasing MAUs
Key mistakes you want to avoid when tracking MAUs and some handy solutions
Let’s get started with a quick definition.
What is MAU?
Monthly active users (MAUs) track the number of unique individuals who interact with your platform within a month. MAUs are a critical metric for understanding how engaged people are with your digital product or service.
But carefully defining "interaction" is vital for getting accurate and meaningful data. It goes beyond just having an account or downloading an app.
A truly active user takes meaningful actions within your product. However, keep in mind that what you define as “meaningful” will be up to you and your specific business goals.
How are MAUs different from DAUs and WAUs?
To get a complete picture of user engagement, most businesses also track:
Daily active users (DAUs): Unique users who engaged with your product on a specific day. This is great for high-frequency platforms like social media or messaging apps.
Weekly active users (WAUs): Unique users who engaged within a given week. This sits between the long-term view of MAU and the immediate snapshot of DAU.
By tracking MAUs, WAUs, and DAUs together, you see patterns across different time spans.
Did a new feature boost daily engagement, but have no long-term impact on monthly figures?
Or is overall growth steady, but fewer people are checking the product every single day?
This kind of insight lets you refine your strategies, improve the user experience, and ultimately impact your key business metrics (such as revenue, profit margins, and retention).
Why should you track MAUs?
In the SaaS industry, understanding how people engage with your offering is critical. Monthly active users are a goldmine in this respect, providing a vital indicator that goes beyond simple signups or total downloads.
Why are MAUs so important?
Because they move beyond short-term spikes or vanity metrics and provide a window into broader user engagement trends. Here's how:
MAUs smooth out fluctuations: Unlike DAUs, which can see natural ups and downs, MAUs provide a more stable picture. This stability allows you to identify long-term trends, such as whether you're attracting and retaining more active users over time.
For instance: Are there seasonal patterns in engagement? MAUs can reveal these trends, helping you pinpoint areas that need improvement or celebrate successes.
MAUs show commitment, not just curiosity: A high number of downloads or signups doesn't necessarily equate to a thriving product. MAUs highlight users who are consistently coming back and interacting with your platform.
This sustained engagement is a strong indicator that they find value in what you offer — a key factor in building long-term loyalty.
MAUs track sustainable growth: Marketing campaigns can bring in waves of new users, but not all of them stick around. MAUs help you see past short-lived spikes and assess the real health of your product or service over time.
A steadily increasing MAU number is a strong sign of genuine and sustainable growth, indicating your product is truly resonating with users who’ll stick with you for the long haul.
A quick guide for tracking MAUs
Tracking monthly active users may sound straightforward, but there are a few important details for getting accurate results that are truly useful. Let's break it down step by step:
1. Define what “active” means for your business
This is the foundation for making your MAU data meaningful, especially for SaaS products. Move beyond simply counting logins and identify what actions demonstrate a user is truly getting value from your software. Here are some ways to approach this:
Core feature usage: Focus on interactions with the main functionalities your software offers. For example, if you provide project management tools, an active user might be someone who updates task statuses, adds comments to projects, or views project overviews at least twice a week.
Specific actions: Define a set of actions within your software that signifies active use. Let's say your product offers image editing capabilities. An active user could be someone who edits and saves one image, applies filters, or uses different editing tools in your app within the month.
Engagement and outcomes: Tailor your definition of "active" to achieving specific outcomes within your app or SaaS tool. This could involve completing a core workflow or generating a report.
For instance, an active user of a data analysis platform might be someone who uploads a dataset and generates a report within the month.
2. Focus on unique users
The emphasis in MAUs is on the "U" — unique. This means you're not simply counting the total number of interactions, but the number of individual users engaging with your product. It's key to keep these points in mind:
Identifying users: How you identify unique users depends on your setup. This could involve usernames, email addresses, or unique identifiers assigned by your system, such as user ID numbers (which also work for tracking across devices.)
Tracking across devices: If users access your application from multiple devices, you may need to implement solutions that link activity to a single user, rather than counting them as separate users on each device. This could involve cookies or user IDs.
Anonymized data: If privacy is paramount (and it should be), consider utilizing anonymized user tracking. Assign unique identifiers without collecting personally identifiable information. Depending on your business and regional regulations, this may be important to address.
3. Choose the right tools for the job
The most suitable method for tracking MAUs in your product depends on two things: the complexity of your platform and how detailed you want your user engagement data to be.
For straightforward websites or simple applications, basic analytics tools like Google Analytics are a good starting point. These platforms often allow you to track MAUs based on user logins or pre-defined actions. This is ideal for smaller products or those where "active" user behavior is simple to define.
If you have a more complex SaaS solution, directly querying your own database can provide greater detail. This lets you identify unique users who met your specific criteria for "active" use within the past month.
While offering more flexibility, this approach often requires in-house development resources to set up and maintain.
For the most in-depth insights into user engagement, consider investing in a dedicated product analytics platform. These platforms are specifically designed to help you understand how users interact with your SaaS product.
They offer powerful features for defining what "active" means to you (based on specific actions, events triggered within the app, time spent, or even overall user workflows).
Additionally, product analytics platforms allow you to break down users into distinct groups (new vs. returning, subscription plans, etc.). This lets you see how MAU trends differ between segments, allowing you to tailor strategies for each.
Finally, these platforms put MAUs into context by allowing you to view them alongside other crucial KPIs like churn, conversion rates, and feature usage. This complete view paints a holistic picture of your product's health with much more accuracy.
Three things you can do to increase your MAUs
As you know by now, growing your monthly active user count is about nurturing a consistently engaged user base that fuels your business's long-term success. Let's dive into three powerful strategies to boost your MAUs:
1. Design for delight
A frictionless, intuitive user experience is the foundation of a product people want to keep coming back to. Focus on making every interaction enjoyable and effortless. Here's how:
Invest your user interface (UI): Is your product visually appealing and easy to navigate? Even small improvements here can make a big difference in how your software or platform is perceived.
Prioritize usability for better results: Can users complete tasks without struggle? Conduct user testing sessions to uncover friction points and make necessary refinements.
Offer deeper personalization options: Customizing the layout, settings, and content each user sees fosters a sense of ownership and increased engagement. You can do this with tools like contextual bandit algorithms.
2. Keep things fresh
Regular updates, whether they introduce new features, content, or simply fix bugs, serve a powerful purpose. They signal to users that your product is actively maintained and evolving. Here are some tips to keep users engaged:
Listen to feedback: What are users requesting? Incorporating suggestions based on what your community is telling you builds loyalty and demonstrates you're responsive to what they’re saying.
Content is king (more often than not): If your product involves content (articles, videos, etc.), a steady stream of new additions keeps users coming back for more. For instance, you can change the angle and strategy of your content campaign if a new major update is on the horizon.
Even "small" wins matter: Don't underestimate the power of bug fixes and performance improvements. These enhance user experience and increase the likelihood they'll return. Most importantly, make these fixes known to all your user base.
3. Create an onboarding experience that sticks
First impressions matter. Excellent onboarding guides users to quickly discover your product's value, making them far more likely to become active, returning users. Check out these tips to create a memorable onboarding journey:
Don't overwhelm: Break onboarding into digestible steps, focusing on the core actions that demonstrate your product's utility. It’s tempting to infodump but remember that easy does it. It’s better to drip-feed information rather than flood users with it.
Interactive > passive: Avoid long tutorials or instructions. Let users learn by doing with guided prompts within the product itself. You could even use gamification to make tutorials part of a checklist users must complete.
Celebrate early wins: Reward completion of initial onboarding tasks. This provides positive reinforcement and motivates continued exploration. This also ties back to the gamification tip and also applies to rewarding users for getting their onboarding done.
Pitfalls to avoid when tracking your MAUs
Monthly active users may seem like a simple metric, but there are a few traps you can fall into that can mislead you about the true health of your product. Here are two major ones to watch out for:
1. Miscounting users
Remember, the focus of MAUs is on unique users, not the total number of interactions. If a single highly active user logs in 100 times in a month, that should still only count as 1 MAU, not 100.
Solution: How you identify and track users matters. Usernames or email addresses are common ways, but you may need to link sessions using unique IDs assigned by your system.
2. Double-counting across devices
Users interact with products on their phones, tablets, and computers. If you can't accurately link activity across these devices, you might be counting the same person multiple times, inflating your MAUs.
Solution: Leverage tracking methods (cookies, device fingerprinting, etc.), being mindful of privacy regulations — or ideally, require user logins. Associating activity with a logged-in account provides the most reliable way to track individual users across devices.
Next steps
Now that you grasp the importance of monthly active users, you're likely wondering how to track this metric and use it to fuel your business's growth.
The answer lies in using Eppo.
Eppo is a powerful feature management and experimentation platform designed to help business-to-consumer companies make sense of the data behind their MAUs and drive key metrics like revenue, engagement, and long-term growth.
Here's how Eppo empowers you:
Pinpoint factors for long-term loyalty: Discover how your most consistently engaged users interact with your product. What key actions or value propositions keep them returning week after week? Eppo’s clear and easy-to-share reports help with this.
Get granular with WAU insights: Break down your weekly active users by segments (demographics, how they found you, preferences). Understand which user groups are most engaged and deliver experiences for particular contexts with Eppo’s Contextual Bandits and measure their performance.
Boost WAU through rigorous testing: Conduct A/B tests directly within Eppo, experimenting with changes to onboarding, features, or design. Measure the precise impact these changes have on your weekly active users.
The Eppo difference: Eppo's warehouse-native approach gives you accurate, unbiased data directly from your source of truth. When combined with its experimentation capabilities, Eppo empowers you to continuously optimize features and workflows for the highest possible WAU.
Find out what’s driving engagement: Analyze your most active users to pinpoint what keeps them returning month after month. Eppo's comprehensive reporting tools reveal the features, actions, and aspects of your product that drive loyalty.
Analyze with pinpoint accuracy: Segment your MAU data by user demographics, acquisition channels, subscription tiers, and more. This focused analysis with Eppo's Contextual Bandits identifies which user groups are most consistently active, optimizing experiences for each segment.
Boost MAUs through experimentation: Eppo's A/B testing capabilities allow you to rigorously test changes to onboarding, feature additions, UI improvements, and more. See the direct impact of each change on your monthly active users.
The Eppo advantage: Forget sampling or biased data. Eppo's data warehouse-native approach provides accurate, trustworthy insights directly from your source of truth. When coupled with its experimentation capabilities, Eppo allows you to continuously optimize your product to maximize MAU growth.
Ready to boost your MAUs with data-driven insights and rigorous experimentation?
Learn why monthly active users (MAUs) are crucial for product success. Understand how to track them, increase MAUs, avoid common pitfalls, and use MAUs for growth.
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