What Is Monthly Active Users (MAU) + Tips To Increase It

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What are monthly active users (MAU)? 🤔

Monthly Active Users (MAU) is the measure of the number of unique users who have interacted with a product or service within a month-long period.

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Here’s an example of MAU 👇🏼

Let's say you're the PM of a mobile gaming app, and you want to measure the usage frequency of your app over a month-long period. You can use MAU to track the number of unique users who open and engage with your app at least once within that month. For example, in the month of May, you had 10,000 unique users who opened and engaged with your app at least once. In June, that number increased to 15,000. This means that your MAU increased by 5,000 users from May to June, indicating growth 🚀

You can use this metric to identify patterns and trends in user behavior.

For instance, if you notice that there's a spike in MAU with users who signed up during a particular week, you can analyze the app's features, user behavior, and marketing campaigns during that period to identify what caused the spike 🚀.

This information can then be used to optimize the app's features and prioritize marketing efforts to find the right users and increase MAU further 🫂

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Btw we also write breakdown business models and create growth strategies for them. Our most famous ones are the Zepto Business Model & Meesho Business Model breakdowns. We also create loaded templates 💪🏼 to make your life as a growth operator easier.

How can you calculate monthly active users? 🧮

There are two simple steps to calculate monthly active users

Choose a time period 📅

Choose a 30-day period that you want to measure. For example, if you want to calculate MAU for the month of January, choose January 1 to January 31. However, this period can also be staggered like January 15 to February 15.

Count unique users 🫂

Count the number of unique users who have interacted with your product or service within that 30-day period. A unique user is someone who has used your product or service at least once within that time frame.

What are some ways to increase monthly active users? 📈

Increasing monthly active users is highly contextual and depends on the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD)of the app. Based on the usage frequency and core user goals, MAUs may look different for different types of products, but here are some general tips to increase MAUs 🚀

✅ Increase the Top of the funnel

With new acquisition channels

Doubling down on existing acquisition channels

✅ Improve onboarding

Remove obstructions and blockers in the user flow

Improve user experience by adding new flows Ex: Quick login using Google, Facebook etc.

✅ Find ways to incorporate Aha moments in the onboarding

This leads to increased retention & higher MAUs

✅ Adding gamification strategies to ensure app usage frequency is high

Streaks

Checklists

✅ Offering freemium or free trials

This can effectively improve user adoption, leading to higher MAUs

✅Improving the quality of the product

Keep adding upgrades to improve the user experience

Collect customer feedback as a priority across the organization

What are some metrics that are directly tied to MAU?

MAU is not a standalone product metric. Looking at MAU alone does not give you the full picture of the inner working of a user journey. There are some more metrics that directly affect the total Monthly Active Users in your product. Some of them include ⏬

✅ Daily Active Users

Daily Active Users (DAU) represents the number of unique users who have interacted with your product or application within a 24-hour period.

✅ Weekly Active Users

Weekly active users are a metric that measures the number of unique users who engage with a particular product or service within a given week.

✅ No of new users acquired

The number of new users acquired can directly impact the MAU. For example, in social products, network effects play a very important role for MAU. So more often than not, it’s a user acquisition problem >>> an engagement problem 💪🏼.

✅ Total Churn Rate

There are two types of churn rate - revenue & usage. You should always track both to get a wholesome understanding of user behavior. The number of users who cancel their subscription could be a revenue churn, while the number of users who stop using your app might be a usage churn. Usage churn more often than not leads to revenue churn eventually.

✅ Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV)

Customer Lifetime Value is the amount of revenue a customer generates over their entire relationship with your company. If your MAU is high, it leads to a higher CLTV in the future.

✅ Net Promoter Score (NPS)

A measure of customer satisfaction and loyalty. This metric can be used to identify areas where your app can be improved and to gauge how likely your users are to recommend your app to others. A high NPS product naturally has a better pull in the market and also has higher MAUs. Both of these factors eventually lead to healthy revenue numbers in the future.

✅ Net Retention Rate:

Retention rate is the number of new users that you were able to retain after a day/ week/ month. Retention rate is highly specific to the type of product, natural usage frequency, and the JTBD of the product.

P.S: If you loved reading about this growth metric, you will find this list of 23 growth metrics incredibly helpful 💪🏼

Who are Monthly Active Users (MAU)?