.png)
%202.png)
Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Active Users are core engagement metrics every Product Manager should understand, but choosing the right one depends on how your product delivers value.
For advanced Product Managers, the magic isn’t in tracking one, it’s in comparing them. Use ratios like DAU:MAU to measure stickiness and spot habit-forming behaviour.
Segment by cohort, tie changes to product events, and always ask why the numbers move.
The real value of these metrics comes from context, not just counts.
📌 Want to go deeper?
Explore our full guides to DAU, WAU, MAU, and Product Stickiness.
Whether you're building a mobile app used daily or a complex B2B platform touched once a month, understanding how often users return is critical to knowing whether your product is delivering value.
Active user metrics, Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Active Users, are the heartbeat of product engagement. They give Product Managers a consistent, quantifiable way to measure whether users are actually coming back, how often, and in what context.
Too often, teams focus on vanity metrics like downloads or total signups. But seasoned Product Managers know that engagement isn’t about acquisition; it’s about retention.
These metrics help answer questions like:
Each of these metrics tracks unique users who engage with your product over a defined period of time. The difference lies in the frequency:
The number of unique users who engage with your product in a 24-hour window.
Daily Active Users is ideal for products that are designed to be used every day. Think social media apps, messaging platforms, or habit-based tools like Duolingo.
✅ Use it to track:
📌 Check out our full guide to Daily Active Users
_.png)
The number of unique users who interact with your product over a 7-day period.
Weekly Active Users is best for products that are used regularly, but not necessarily daily, such as product management tools, collaboration platforms, or internal dashboards.
✅ Use it to track:
📌 Check out our full guide to Weekly Active Users
_.png)
📅 Monthly Active Users (MAU)
The number of unique users who engage with your product in a 30-day window.
Monthly Active Users is commonly used to measure overall reach, retention, and growth; especially for products that don’t require frequent use to be valuable (e.g., financial tools, marketplaces, or subscription services).
✅ Use it to track:
📌 Check out our full guide to Monthly Active Users
_.png)
Your product is built for daily use and thrives on habit formation.
Daily Active Users is especially useful for:
Why it works
Daily Active User counts are sensitive to small changes and helps track habit loops. Great for A/B tests and rapid iteration.
🧠 Pro Tip: Daily Active Users is a great leading indicator of habit, but dangerous if overemphasized, especially for products not designed for daily use.
📌 See how Duolingo grew Daily Active Users
Your product fits into a weekly workflow but isn’t used every day.
Weekly Active Users is ideal for:
Why it works
Weekly Active User counts give a strong signal without the volatility of Daily Active Users. Perfect for B2B and recurring-use products.
🧠 Pro Tip: Weekly Active Users is the "goldilocks" metric for many B2B teams.
📌 See how Zoom drove Weekly Active Users
You want a top-level view of growth, reach, or long-term retention.
Monthly Active Users is commonly used for:
Why it works
Monthly Active User counts are great for tracking total reach and top-line engagement over time.
🧠 Pro Tip: Monthly Active Users alone can be misleading, always compare it to Daily or Weekly Active Users to spot churn, stickiness, or re-engagement opportunities.
📌 See how Notion mastered Monthly Active Users
Metrics in isolation tell you something. Ratios tell you everything.
One of the most useful metrics for understanding user stickiness is the Daily:Monthly Active User ratio. It tells you what percentage of your monthly users are coming back on a daily basis. The higher the ratio, the greater the habit formation.
Before you can calculate it, you'll need two metrics from the same 30-day period:
Once you have both the calculation is simple:
DAU:MAU Ratio (Stickiness) = Average DAU ÷ MAU
This will give you a value between 0 and 1, which you can multiply by 100 to express as a percentage. The higher the percentage, the more frequently users are returning throughout the month.
Let’s say you’re reviewing product engagement data for April:
You calculate the DAU:MAU ratio using our formula:
25,000 ÷ 100,000 = 0.25
This means your stickiness score is 0.25, or 25%. Meaning roughly one quarter of your monthly users are using your product daily. That’s a healthy sign of engagement, especially for tools designed for frequent use.
Your stickiness ratio provides insight into how embedded your product is in users' lives. Here's how to interpret the result:
Tracking this ratio over time, and across different user cohorts, can help you spot behaviour trends, flag drop-offs, or celebrate when a new feature meaningfully boosts engagement.
👉 Learn how to define, measure, and improve your product’s stickiness in our full guide:
The Product Manager’s Guide to Stickiness
Looking at Daily, Weekly, or Monthly Active Users as a single number can be dangerously misleading. Cohort analysis helps you see what’s really happening beneath the surface.
A cohort is simply a group of users who share a common trait, for example:
By comparing engagement across cohorts, you can spot patterns like:
📌 Example:
Two cohorts might both contribute 10,000 Monthly Active Users. But if one returns weekly while the other logs in twice a month, you’re looking at very different engagement profiles. That’s the difference between passive interest and ongoing value.
Cohort analysis turns broad engagement data into actionable product insights.
A rising Daily Active User count looks impressive on a dashboard. It’s tempting to take it at face value as a sign of growth. But without context, that number is meaningless at best but misleading at worst.
A spike in activity could mean a variety of things:
✅ A successful feature launch: users are excited about a new capability and returning more often to explore it. Great news.
📣 A surge in traffic from a marketing campaign: you drove awareness, but are those users actually converting or returning after Day 1?
🐞 A bug or UX issue: users may be refreshing pages repeatedly or re-triggering workflows out of confusion or necessity. This inflates engagement while actually harming experience.
🤖 Bot traffic or spam accounts: common in freemium models or public-facing platforms, bots can dramatically distort engagement metrics if left unchecked.
That’s why tracking trends is more important than snapshots. If your Daily Active User count jumps by 30% this week, ask:
Similarly, if your Monthly Active User Count is flat but your Weekly Active User count is rising, that may indicate a smaller user base is becoming more engaged which is a powerful signal if you’re focused on retention or monetisation.
📌 The key is to tie engagement changes to specific events:
Numbers are just signals. Interpretation is where the product magic happens.
As Product Manager your job isn’t to chase metrics, it’s to understand what they’re telling you about the user experience and act accordingly.
DAU, WAU, and MAU all measure unique active users over different timeframes: daily, weekly, and monthly. The right one to use depends on your product's usage frequency.
Align your metric with how often your product delivers value:
A higher ratio means your users are returning more frequently.
Divide the average number of Daily Active Users over a 30-day period by your Monthly Active Users.
Formula: Stickiness = Avg DAU ÷ MAU
Check out our complete guide to Product Stickiness
Yes! Many teams monitor all three. Comparing them helps uncover patterns in user engagement, retention, and growth quality.
Monthly Active Users gives a big-picture view of product reach and market traction. It’s a top-line growth indicator, especially for products with infrequent but high-value use cases.
Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Active Users aren't competing metrics, they're lenses. The key is picking the one that aligns with how your product is actually used.
What matters most isn’t the number itself, but what you learn from how it changes: the habits it reflects, the friction it reveals, the growth it signals.
As a Product Manager you shouldn’t chase metrics. Use them to ask better questions, because that’s what turns data into decisions and at the same time will transform you into a leader.
.png)
.png)
.png)