Monthly Active Users (MAU)
The number of unique users who engage with your product at least once within a 30-day period. The standard measure of product reach and adoption.
Also known as: MAU
Why It Matters
MAU captures the total addressable engagement of your product over a meaningful time window. While DAU measures daily habits, MAU includes users who engage weekly or bi-weekly, giving you the full picture of your active user base.
MAU is particularly important for products that are not designed for daily use - like analytics platforms, expense tools, or monthly reporting dashboards. Growth in MAU indicates expanding adoption.
How to Track in KISSmetrics
KISSmetrics tracks unique users over rolling periods. Use the Activity Report with a 30-day window to see MAU trends. Compare MAU across segments to identify which user groups are growing or shrinking.
Common Mistakes
- -Using the same "active" definition for all product types - adjust for expected usage frequency
- -Not distinguishing between organic returns and users who only return from re-engagement emails
- -Celebrating MAU growth while DAU stays flat - this means breadth without depth
Pro Tips
- +Track the ratio of new vs returning MAU to understand growth composition
- +Segment MAU by feature usage to identify your most and least engaging capabilities
- +Watch for "hollow MAU" - users who log in but do not complete any meaningful action
Related Terms
Daily Active Users (DAU)
The number of unique users who engage with your product on a given day. A core engagement metric for consumer and product-led SaaS applications.
DAU/MAU Ratio
The ratio of daily active users to monthly active users, expressed as a percentage. Measures how frequently your monthly users return on a daily basis - also called stickiness.
Stickiness
Stickiness is a measure of how frequently users return to a product, most commonly calculated as the ratio of daily active users (DAU) to monthly active users (MAU), indicating how habit-forming and indispensable a product is.
Retention Analysis
Retention analysis measures the percentage of users who continue to return to and engage with a product over time, tracking how well a product sustains its user base beyond initial acquisition.
See Monthly Active Users (MAU) in action
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