Daily Active Users refers to the number of unique users of an application that have actively engaged with it at least once in a day. An active user can be a paying or non-paying user, for example, taking part in a free trial. Unique users can be identified by a username, an email, or a user id.
Frequency of application usage can vary depending on the nature of the application, the context of usage, and the role of the user. In general, examples of applications used daily include social and instant messaging, calendars, mail, and games.
The Daily Active User metric indicates the stickiness of an application with individual users. Sudden changes in daily usage trends can be an early warning sign of potential churn, because it can indicate that a technical issue may have occurred.
It is important to differentiate between tracking the daily active users and daily active accounts of an application because users are a subset of accounts, for most SaaS applications. Analyzing active users can highlight how valuable the application is to multiple unique users of an account as opposed to just the account level engagement.
Since DAU is such a granular level of usage tracking, it can highlight the activities or features of an application that get used daily, therefore bringing value to the customer. Conversely, tracking adoption of the features of an application that are determined to be the most useful can help predict future retention and churn.
