What Are Monthly Active Users (MAU)?

MAU measures how many unique users interact with your product in a month.

For a social media platform, it could be anyone who logs in, likes a post, or comments. For a mobile game, it's anyone who opens the app and plays.

To calculate your MAU, count the number of unique users who take an action, like signing in, making a purchase, or performing a key action, at least once during the month. MAU shows you how many people find your product useful and engaging enough to come back to regularly.

Why is MAU important?

MAU is a key metric for evaluating the growth and health of your product. If your MAU is increasing over time, it means you're attracting new users and keeping existing ones engaged. Dropping MAU could signal problems with user experience, lack of new content, or other issues driving people away.

How do you increase MAU?

There are a few proven strategies for boosting your monthly active users:

• Improve your new user onboarding. The first experience with your product is critical. Make signing up and getting started as easy as possible.

• Add valuable and engaging content. Give people reasons to keep coming back, whether it's blog posts, videos, tutorials, or other media. Stay on a consistent content schedule to keep users engaged.

• Optimize your user experience. Make your product as intuitive, useful, and pleasurable to use as possible. Simple things like faster load times, easy navigation, and responsive design matter a lot.

• Drive referrals and social sharing. Word-of-mouth marketing from your existing users is one of the best ways to get new people into your product. Make it easy for people to share and promote your product to their friends and followers.

• Targeted marketing campaigns. While referrals from existing users are ideal, you also need to reach new potential customers through social media advertising, content marketing, email marketing, and other channels. Be strategic in targeting people most likely to benefit from your product.

• Improve retention. Focus on keeping as many of your new and existing users as possible engaged with your product. Some ways to improve retention include personalizing the experience, rewarding loyalty, and continuing to deliver value to long-term users.

Calculating and Tracking Your MAU

Calculating your MAU is pretty straightforward. You need to track unique users in your system and count any who perform a "qualifying" action within a calendar month. A qualifying action is whatever you define as engagement for your product. It could be a login, content view, purchase, message sent, etc. At the end of the month, sum up all the unique users who took a qualifying action that month. That's your MAU.

Boosting Engagement and Increasing Your MAU 

To grow your MAU (monthly active users), focus on engaging your current users and acquiring new ones. Think of creative ways to keep people coming back to your product each month.

1) Optimize the user experience

A smooth user experience is key to engagement. Make sure your website or app is easy to navigate, fast, and bug-free. Consider sending in-app surveys to get feedback on how to improve. Even small tweaks, like simplifying your onboarding process or menu layout, can make a big difference.

2) Create a content calendar

Having a steady stream of fresh content, like blog posts, videos, social media updates, and email newsletters, keeps people engaged with your brand. Create an editorial calendar to plan content months in advance. Provide value to your audience and be active in the communities they frequent.

3) Build a community

Engaged users often come from a sense of community. Foster connections between your users by creating spaces for discussion and interaction, such as forums, Facebook groups, and events. Engage with your community by participating in discussions and highlighting the most active members. A strong community will lead to higher MAU and brand loyalty.

4) Gamify the experience 

Loyalty programs, rewards, and experiences like streaks drive traffic to your product by giving people an incentive to return more frequently. For example, you can offer discounts, coupons, or exclusive perks for users who log in a certain number of times per month. Multi-level challenges that award coins, points, etc. are also highly engaging. Just be sure the frequency and complexity match your business goals.

Stay focused on optimizing the user experience, creating valuable content, building community, and gamifying the experience. Engaged, loyal users become your biggest advocates and help grow your business through word-of-mouth.