What is an active user?

An active user is one who has opened or meaningfully engaged with a product within a defined time period — typically measured daily or monthly.

Growth and engagement

All 220 terms

The definition is the whole metric

Active is not a fact about a user; it is a threshold you choose. Does opening the app count? Opening it and doing nothing? Receiving a notification? Background sync?

The loosest defensible definition produces a much larger number than the strictest, from identical underlying behaviour. Because active user counts are quoted externally and used internally to judge growth, there is persistent pressure toward the loose end.

The discipline is to define active as engagement that indicates value received, write the definition down, and change it only deliberately and with restated history.

DAU, MAU and stickiness

[DAU](/resources/glossary/daily-active-users-dau). Unique users on a single day.
[MAU](/resources/glossary/monthly-active-users-mau). Unique users over 30 days.
[Stickiness](/resources/glossary/user-stickiness). DAU divided by MAU — how much of the monthly base shows up on an average day.
Weekly active where the product's natural rhythm is weekly, which is common in B2B and avoids penalising a product nobody should use daily.

What the count hides

An active user count is a headline that conceals the distribution beneath it. A million MAU comprising a small deeply-engaged core and a large occasional fringe is a different business from a million evenly-engaged users, and the same number describes both.

The metric that reveals it is the engagement distribution — what proportion of the base accounts for what proportion of sessions — and it is worth looking at more often than the headline. Products usually discover their real audience is much smaller and much more valuable than their MAU suggests.

Common questions

Should I use DAU or MAU?

Whichever matches the product's natural usage rhythm. Reporting DAU for a product used monthly makes healthy behaviour look like failure, and the reverse flatters a product nobody returns to.

Does receiving a push notification make a user active?

It should not. Counting passive receipt as activity inflates the number without any user deciding anything, which is the clearest example of a definition drifting toward the loose end.

Where we write about active user

More in growth and engagement

Acquiring users, and the behaviour that says whether they stayed.

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