How exactly is DAU / MAU calculated?

Question

I'm reading a lot about DAU/MAU being a good metric for user engagement. But what is a DAU and what is a MAU?

For Daily Active Users: Is a user not a Daily Active User if they missed one day in the past 30 days?

For Monthly Active Users: Is a user a Monthly Active User if they were present once in the past 30 days?

Should I even be measuring by the past 30 days or should I go by calendar months?

jimg · Answer 1 · 2013-02-27 14:08:51Z

'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.'

There are no hard and fast rules here - It means whatever the implementator decides is a valid action.

Example: Facebook defines Monthly Active Users as the number of unique users per the past 30 days.

Which then brings one to another question - what defines a unique user? In facebook land, these are the actions that are tracked / define it:

mock ajax request
fbml link click
canvas page view
click-to-play swf
message attachment
fbjs ajax
accepting a request
viewing a profile tab
publishing something via a publisher

As you can see, these actions are meaningless outside of facebook. To define your own MAU, you need to instrument actions that best describe activities that represent "active" use.

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