Measuring your daily, weekly, and monthly active users, known as DAU, WAU, and MAU, can give your team a baseline for tracking growth and retention. Different tools and organizations define these terms differently, so let’s start by establishing how these terms are used at Heap.
Measuring a user
Heap differentiates between count and count unique, where count is the total of times an event has occurred and count unique represents each individual user that completed an event. For example, if one user completed the same event four times, the count would be four, and the count unique would be one.
Count unique is the measurement you should use to measure how many users completed an action. Our Graph module allows you to measure the Count Unique for a given action.
Measuring activity
Activity relates to actions completed by your users, which correspond to events in Heap. Your definition of an ‘active’ user will depend on what user actions you use to determine ‘activity’. Is it simply logging in? Completing a certain flow? Clicking a specific button or viewing a specific page?
In Heap, this is defined as your active usage event, which can be any user interaction with a feature, section of your app, or a page of your website. To run certain suggested reports, such as What is the actual makeup of my active user base? you’ll be prompted to define your active usage event.
When building a graph, you can select this event as the one you want to measure count unique for. In Heap, we may count activity as when a customer runs a report.
Measuring time
Heap allows you to set a date range for your report, including today, yesterday, past 7 days, past 30 days, and beyond. You can use these date range options to check for daily, weekly, and monthly activity.
By default, Heap comes with segments to allow you to measure daily, weekly, and monthly active users. You can review these segments by navigating to Definitions > Segments.
Active is defined as having conducted a session within that time frame. For example, the definition of the Daily Active Users segment is users who have done sessions in the past day, as seen below. For Weekly Active Users, this value is past 7 days, and for monthly, it is past 30 days.
Bringing it all together
Using the segments and analysis tools linked above, you can measure daily, weekly, or monthly active usage in a few different ways.
In this example, we will graph the number of users who have done sessions (where sessions can be replaced by any other event) in the past day over the past 30 days so we can see the count of daily and monthly active users. To see these metrics only for free users, we’ll filter for users on the free plan.
The suggested report What is my ratio of daily active users to monthly active users? sets this ratio up for you using predefined segments, which you can customize to analyze this activity further.
Here’s a full list of suggested reports you can use to get started measuring daily, weekly, and monthly active users:
- What are my daily/weekly/monthly user counts?
- What is my ratio of daily active users to monthly active users?
- What percent of my monthly active users are using a feature?
To learn about active account analysis, see our Account Health Analysis guide. For a deep dive into creating KPIs based on user activation analysis, get our Measuring User Activation ebook.