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How does Heap measure daily, weekly, and monthly active users?

In this article you'll learn:

  • How Heap defines users, activity, and time
  • How to measure DAU, WAU, and MAU in Heap

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

Under the Usage over time chart select Unique users to measure how many users completed an 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 chart templates, 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 chart.

Measuring time

Heap allows you to set a date range for your chart, 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.

The segments Daily Active Users, Monthly Active Users, and Weekly Active Users as listed on the segments page

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.

The Edit Segment Criteria section filtered by Users who have done sessions in past day

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.

A graph of users who have done sessions in past day over number of users who have done sessions in past 30 days filtered by plan equals free

The chart template 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 chart templates you can use to get started measuring daily, weekly, and monthly active users:

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.