Learning the Jargon of Mobile App Marketing – DAU

DAU – Daily Average Users

When someone downloads your app, you hope they install it, play with it, love it, and play it every day. This is the dream of every developer and the hopes of those who put money into making the app. Developers are always looking for that daily app. Maybe it’s a fitness app, or an alarm apps, or maybe the occasional game app are pushing for the daily user. The daily user is someone who is comfortable with your app and happy to use it on their phone or tablet.

What is DAU?

A DAU is the Daily Average User. Though there are discussions on what is a “daily” user, I consider them anyone who opens the app for any reason in the day. This could be to respond to a message, read a news article, or to see that cat video your friend sent you. Anytime you are using the app today, you are a DAU.

Why is DAU important?

Retention. Keeping people coming back for more is always the best way to know if you will be getting future revenue. TechCrunch had an article stating that most apps lose 2/3 of their users after day one. So keeping them coming is crucial to keeping your app’s popularity strong. Understanding how to keep people using your app everyday and enjoy their usage of your app increases a developers chance to make money through advertisements, micro-transactions, or purchases from the app. Retention is also important because it means that those who use the app everyday are more likely to pay and become an APU (average paying user). The numbers can also help you find some problems within your app you may not have known.
An example given for understanding your apps DAU was the Fox News app. In this article, the app dropped DAUs on weekends by 30%. This might be because people don’t view the news on weekends or there aren’t many large news story shared on the weekends. Fox News can learn from this and add more interesting articles that only are available on the weekend to boost their DAUs on the weekend.

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Any other uses of DAU?

DAU and MAU (monthly average users) are always seen together as a DAU/MAU ratio (aka “stickiness”). This ratio gives app developers a great idea about how well their retention are compared to those who use the app sometimes during the month.

Low percentages shows a lack of content or infrequent interest in the app that makes users not want to visit every day and can lead to lower revenue. Stickiness can also show how well your app is doing against your competition. Having a better stickiness means you are doing something better with your users that your competitors haven’t found out about.

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