Daily active users (DAUs)

Daily active users, or DAUs, refer to the number of unique users that visit or engage with a product on a daily basis. 

Tracking DAUs is a key metric for apps and mobile marketers as it provides insight into the level of engagement and retention of users. A growing number of DAUs indicates that you’re attracting new users to the platform and likely retaining users that are revisiting the app each day. Conversely, a low or decreasing number of DAUs indicates the product isn’t retaining users or attracting new users each day.

As a mobile marketer, tracking the number of daily active users is crucial to understanding the effectiveness of your current campaigns and the overall performance of the app. As mentioned, DAUs provide key insights into user engagement and can help you identify which campaigns are actually driving more users to the app.

DAUs are influenced by several factors such as the marketing campaigns currently being run, new feature launches, and the overall level of product-market-fit. For example, a product may experience a short-term spike in DAUs after a successful feature launch, but without the right tactics in place to retain and convert users to paying customers, this spike in DAUs may not actually translate to higher ROI for the company.

Just like any other marketing metric, DAUs are just one aspect of the app or product’s overall performance and should be analyzed in the context of other metrics such as the retention rate, conversion rate, and so on. That said, one of the key benefits of tracking DAUs for marketers is that it gives you a real-time snapshot of how well your campaigns and app are doing at attracting and re-engaging users. By monitoring how many unique users engage with your app on a daily basis, you can identify which campaigns or product changes are actually resulting in growth of your user base.

In addition to providing real-time insights into the health of your app, tracking DAUs can also help you measure the long-term success of your marketing campaigns. For example, by measuring DAUs before and after the launch of a marketing campaign, you can determine the impact and ROI of your efforts on user engagement and retention. With this data in hand, you can further optimize your marketing strategy and allocate resources more effectively in the future.

Lastly, a key benefit of tracking DAUs is that they can help you identify new opportunities for growth. For example, if you notice that your app has high DAUs in a particular geographic region or among a certain demographic, you can use this information in your ad targeting and increase the overall ROAS from your paid campaigns.

Although DAUs are an essential marketing metric to track, beware of over-optimizing for this metric as it can be a vanity metric that misses the bigger picture. 

As Baremetrics highlights:

It is easy to fall into the trap, however, of chasing a DAU goal for the wrong reasons. A DAU can become a vanity number, and many companies like to share impressive DAU data that may have no actual bearing on the success of the business. Be mindful of your DAU, always aim to grow it, and be clear in how you track it.

As a leader in marketing analytics, Singular provides marketers with a comprehensive view of their app performance including tracking daily active users (DAUs). By tracking DAUs over time, Singular enables marketers to take a scientific approach to their growth and identity optimization opportunities. With this data in a single, holistic view, marketers can more efficiently allocate marketing budgets to the efforts and campaigns that have the highest ROI possible.

In summary, by tracking DAUs along with other marketing metrics, Singular provides granular ROI insights that mobile marketers can use to make more informed decisions and drive growth for their company.