Active users
Active users in the Marketing area (Growth) — route /marketing/active-users.
Active users lives in the Marketing area of the dashboard, under Growth.
At a glance#
| Dashboard route | /marketing/active-users |
| Area | Marketing (marketing) |
| Group | Growth |
| Platforms | Available for every app platform. |
What it does#
DAU, WAU and MAU, plus stickiness and the retention curve — the same underlying active-user data as Retention, framed for growth rather than for product analysis.
Stickiness is DAU divided by MAU: roughly, on how many days in a month your average monthly user shows up. It is the single most informative ratio here and the least commonly cited.
When to use it#
As the headline growth number, with the caveat that active users alone is the easiest metric to make look good and the least informative. DAU rising while stickiness falls means you are acquiring more people who use the product less — which reads as growth in a board deck and is a churn problem in progress.
Use it together with the retention curve, which is on the same page for exactly that reason.
Workflow#
Read stickiness alongside DAU
The ratio is what distinguishes engagement from acquisition. It is also stable enough that a change in it means something.
Know what interval your product should have
Stickiness of 10% is excellent for a product used monthly and terrible for a messaging app. There is no universal good number.
Check the retention curve for a floor
A curve that flattens has a committed core. One still declining at week eight does not, and growth will not compound.
Verify identity before trusting any of it
Active-user counts depend on recognising a returning person. Unlinked devices inflate every number here.
Permissions and prerequisites#
Requires event ingestion and identified users. Without identify these are device counts, not user counts.
Limits and edge cases#
"Active" means generated an event. A product usable without emitting anything understates activity.
Anonymous users inflate the counts and depress stickiness, because each device looks like a separate person.
MAU is a trailing window, so it moves slowly and lags a change by weeks.
Same data as the Analyze retention page, so any discrepancy is a time-window difference rather than a different truth.
Troubleshooting#
DAU rising, revenue flat. Check stickiness. New users who do not engage are the usual explanation.
Numbers differ from the retention page. Match the time windows.
Counts look far too high. Identity is not linking devices to people. Check the identity graph.
Where the data comes from#
Served by
Analytics
Growth