What Is MAU?

The monthly active users (MAU) metric tells an app developer how many users are active in their app over a 30-day period. It’s important to track this over time to understand an app’s popularity, stickiness, and if an app is successfully acquiring long-term engaged users.

To calculate MAU, an app developer first needs to define which action they’d like users to complete in order to consider them an active user. These might include opening the app, making an in-app purchase, or creating a profile.
Key Takeaways
  • MAU helps gauge how many users an app is retaining
  • Each user is counted only once, even if they are active several times during a month
  • MAU paired with various other KPIs can help show the healthy month-over-month growth of an app

Why Are Monthly Active Users Important?

Knowing monthly active users is important for understanding how an app’s user base has changed month over month. 

Apps that want to sustainably grow their user base should make sure their marketing efforts result in a steady MAU growth rate. This steady growth can determine an app’s stickiness.

The MAU metric in combination with various other KPIs can be used as a guide to improve an app’s performance over time. For example, it can tell app developers that they need to reevaluate their marketing strategy, pricing, or app design.

chart analzying MAU metric with ARPDAU

What Does a MAU Metric Tell You?

Monitoring monthly active users will provide app developers with the bigger picture of their app’s health if they couple it up with other metrics, such as ARPDAU. But note that these performance KPIs and benchmarks will vary between geos.

For User Acquisition Managers

If an app is heavily investing in acquiring users but is not seeing this translate into long-term MAU growth, the app may not be acquiring users from its target audience. In such instances, user acquisition managers should optimize their UA strategy and evaluate their channels to see which drive the highest user retention.

In addition to challenges finding the right channels, reevaluating an app’s UX and UI could also help increase the number of users that app retains. Optimizing the user onboarding process or integrating more native ads will help increase the number of your app’s long-term users.

For App Monetization Managers

Monitoring demographic growth as well as revenue associated with that growth is essential to ensure an app’s user base has a healthy month-over-month growth. Note that both app monetization potential and revenue for monthly active users from Tier 1 is considerably different than monthly active users in Tier 2. 

If an app’s MAU and monthly revenue growth doesn’t align with what its monetization managers expect, then it’s time to reevaluate things such as an app’s monetization strategy.

Finally, to boost revenue, an app may need to re-engage its users. One solution is to send them push notifications or reminders to drive them further into the app. It’s also worth considering rewarded solutions, which create a compelling reason for them to return to an app.

Is MAU a Good Metric?

MAU can’t measure immediate progress and will not be useful for recently launched apps. 

Besides this, a 30-day time period is also limiting. It measures a user base on a month-to-month basis, so app developers can’t pick up on daily changes to an app’s performance. 

If they need a more precise measurement, daily active users would be more appropriate. Especially, if an app expects its user base to interact with the app every day. 

Despite this, monthly active users is a fundamental metric to monitor in the app economy because it’s one of the first indications of how big an app really is.

chart showing how many monthly active users major apps have

How Do You Increase MAU?

If a team of app developers has identified an issue with their app regarding churn or stickiness, it needs to know how to increase monthly active users. 

App developers should invest in paid user acquisition or grow organically and, generally speaking, have a two-pronged approach: 

  • to work on strategies for engaging new users – through paid and organic channels, such as rewarded ads, video ads
  • to work on strategies or find app solutions to retain existing users – this could be through regular promotions to drive users to use the app or placement optimizations to increase an app’s visibility, for example.

Conclusion

Monthly active users is an important and insightful metric for app developers, monetization managers, and user acquisition managers to monitor closely. 
Not only does the MAU metric indicate the stickiness of an app. Measured together with other key KPIs, such as ARPDAU, app developers can assess the growth of their app over time and develop more targeted strategies going forward to improve app engagement, user acquisition, and revenue.

What Is MAU?

The monthly active users (MAU) metric gives you the number of unique users logging in on your app every month.

How Do You Calculate Monthly Active Users?

You can usually find your MAU metric in your MMP dashboard. It’s the aggregate of your daily active users over a 30-day period.

How Can I Increase My MAU?

You can increase your MAU by analyzing where your app’s problems lie. If you see that your MAU is low or decreasing, you should look into optimizing your campaigns or your UA strategy. 

To boost long-term retention and engagement, you should ensure users have a reason to keep opening your app – whether that’s through rewards, a compelling in-app experience, a way to escape everyday reality, or all of the above.