

Ask HN: How do you calculate the # of active users for your web app? - matt1

This question came up in a conversation recently and we couldn't agree on a good way to do it.<p>For example, let's say you launched an app six months ago and have had 5000 sign ups and are growing at a rate of 100 new users/day.<p>One way to calculate the number of active users would be to count the number of users who have performed a certain action within the last month. The problem is that that also includes everyone who signed up in the last month, many of whom  will never use your service once and never come back. It doesn't seem correct to count them towards your active users.<p>Another way would be to look at all of the users who signed up more than a month ago and who have used your application in the last month, but that seems more complicated than it needs to be.<p>How do you do it? How do you calculate the number of active users for your web app?
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neuromancer2600
Once you simplify your second option it becomes actually pretty easy: count
the number of people who logged in sometime in the last 30 days and subtract
from that the number of people who were signing up during that period. It
should give you some sense how people are using your app at least 30 days into
it. That would be the most basic MAU (monthly active users).

I guess it boils down to what your goal is. Stickiness (repeatable action) is
something very important to understand what really drives interaction. So,
going in with some hypothesis on what you want users to do and then figure out
if that actually holds true is a vital part at all stages.

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spullara
We calculate monthly actives as those who returned this month who didn't sign
up this month. We are also now tracking cohorts of users who joined in certain
week to see how many of them come back week 1, 2, 3, etc. That will let us see
if engagement features we've implemented are working.

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namank
You _could_ start logging the IP of every client and do some analysis based
off of that. Should paint a fairly accurate picture.

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soho33
i would calculate the difference between their registration date and their
last login. then i would add an extra criteria to make sure out of those the
registration date is at least a month old so you would get the number of
active users in the past month who are not new registers.

it's a pretty simple sql query.

