Daily Active Users

Daily active users are a key metric you should follow when you’re in the subscription business. When your DAU is high, it can be a great sign. It’s evidence that your customers are using your product and more customers are signing on. If the number of your daily active users is starting to fall, you could be on the verge of churn. 

What are daily active users (DAU)?

Daily active users (DAU) is a metric that measures the total number of users that log in and engage with your product daily. An “active user” refers to one unique user logging in. Tracking daily active users can provide insight into the number of people who use and value your products or services.

Why is it important to measure DAU?

First off, measuring DAU is a product health check. It’s asking the question: Are your customers using your product? During the R&D and planning period of creating a product, you aren’t inviting outside users to come in and test to see if it works for an everyday individual. Once the product is up and running and your team is happy with that iteration, you hope that customers will not only purchase the product but also use it daily. 

What’s rather important to keep in mind is that you measure daily active users to understand what your customers are using your product for. You may have an idea as to what you think they should be doing, but in reality, it’s not until you measure and analyze data that you’ll uncover how your product is being used.

SaaS brands alike need to understand this metric to uncover areas for improvement and spot when and where churn is about to happen. Doing this will reveal hurdles, drop-off points, and features in your product that may not be necessary, or too complicated. Marketers also use it to properly shape your campaigns in the future towards the most popular aspects of your product among different demographics.