Active users
Active users refer to the number of unique users who engage with an app or a website during a predefined period of time, and is a metric designed to measure growth, churn, and product stickiness.
What is an active user?
As a marketer looking to encourage growth, or a product manager after maximizing retention, you not only need to know how often users access your app/website, but understand the depth of their use and level of engagement.
What do we mean by engagement?
In the app world, the most common example of an active user's engagement is an account log-in. However, engagement can differ across industries and business models.
An online banking app, for example, could define engagement as making a transfer. An eCommerce app, on the other hand, could define this as adding an item to a cart, whereas a SaaS company could focus on software usage.
Either way, active users are identified through a personal unique identifier, which could be their email, user ID, cookies – when dealing with web users – or a combination of all, in case one fails.