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.
Use the What are my daily/weekly/monthly user counts? chart template to define your segments of daily, weekly, and monthly active users. Once they’ve been created, you can review these segments by navigating to Data > 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.
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 usage over time chart, 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.
Creating ratio charts of different segments of active users
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.
In the example below, we’ll chart 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.
Related Chart Templates
Here’s a full list of chart templates 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.