What Is MAU?

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.

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.

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.