Monthly Active Users (MAU)

What is MAU?

The Monthly Active Users metric, sometimes referred to as MAU, measures the number of people who engage with an app within a 30-day time period.

MAU is often used by travel, financial, and other types of applications that are generally only opened a few times a month. Daily Active Users (DAU), on the other hand, is a more common metric for hyper-casual games and news apps, which are generally opened on a daily basis.

How to Calculate Monthly Active Users?

To calculate your app’s MAU, first define what an active user looks like to you. Is it someone who opens your app for 5+ seconds? Someone who completes a level in your game? How about a person who adds a task to your calendar app? Decide what “active” means. Second, use an app analytics tool to capture data related to your definition of an active user. 

So, if you define an active user as any person who opens your app and clicks or scrolls before exiting; then learn that 10,000 people met this criteria last month, your MAU is 10,000.

Calculating your MAU isn’t that difficult. Improving it, however, can be tricky. Try using push notifications and in-app messages to engage users. You can send them out-of-app messages, too, like emails and text messages, with deep links to draw them in.

Of course, simply improving your app/game and making it irresistible to your target audience is a viable way to increase your monthly active user count as well.