G2 32 x 32 White Circle

4.7 STARS ON G2

Product and mobile app analytics insights from industry experts
Globe iconEN
  • America IconEnglish
  • Brazil IconPortuguês
  • Spain IconEspañol
No credit card required

4 MIN READ

SHARE THIS POST

How to Find Active Users of an App

PUBLISHED

20 August, 2024

Tope Longe
Tope Longe

Growth Manager

How to Find Active Users of an App

Not sure how many active users are on your mobile app?

Launching an app is only half the job–the other half is keeping it alive and kicking. One of the many ways to measure your app’s health and performance is to keep track of its active users.

Unfortunately, most teams struggle to do this accurately. This inadequacy often hinders their ability to make informed decisions around app development, marketing strategies, and overall business growth. 

In this UXCam guide, we’ll explain who your app’s active users are and how to find them in a few steps. Then, we’ll show you how to do it with our tool, UXCam.  

Helpful Summary

  • Overview: This article focuses on identifying and tracking active mobile app users using UXCam’s tools. It provides strategies for defining, monitoring, and analyzing active users to boost app performance and user engagement.

  • Why you should listen to us: We have proven expertise in improving the user experience of our clients’ apps. For example, using our insights, JobNimbus boosted its app’s adoption rates by 25%. 

  • Why it matters: Tracking active users helps measure app health, guide product development, predict revenue, and benchmark against competitors. 

  • Action points: Define what constitutes an active user for your app, use UXCam to track these users, and harness this data to improve user engagement and retention.

  • Further research: Explore additional resources on UXCam’s blog for insights into mobile app user behavior and retention strategies.

Why listen to us?

At UXCam, we have firsthand experience helping development and product teams understand and improve their mobile app experiences for their users. Clients using our solutions have recorded significant improvements in their user metrics. 

For example, we helped Costa Coffee increase app registrations by 15% and JobNimbus boost its adoption rates by 25% in a month.

What are active users?

Active users are unique users engaging with an app within a specific period. Product teams use this metric to measure mobile app analytics KPIs like engagement, growth, churn, and product stickiness. 

It’s important to note that the definition of an “active” user can vary depending on your app’s nature and goals. For some apps, simply opening the app might count as an activity, while others may require specific actions like making a purchase or posting content.

Why tracking your app’s active users is important

Measuring app health

Active user metrics are vital to your app’s overall performance. Tracking daily, weekly, and monthly active users gives you a comprehensive view of user engagement levels. This data helps you identify trends, spot potential issues early, and assess the impact of updates or changes.  

Guiding product development

Understanding your active users’ behaviors is important for informed product development. By analyzing which features are used most frequently and how users navigate your app, you can prioritize improvements and new features that cater to your most engaged audience. 

Predicting revenue

Whether your monetization strategy involves in-app purchases, subscriptions, or advertising, engaged users are more likely to contribute to your bottom line. You can more accurately forecast future earnings by correlating active user data with revenue metrics.  

Benchmarking against competitors

Understanding how your active user metrics compare to industry standards and direct competitors is important as it allows you to gauge your app’s market position and identify areas for improvement. 

How to find the active users of an app

Step 1: Define your active users

The first step is to define your app’s active users. Determining what makes a user “active” helps set measurable goals and track the right metrics. 

You can define your active users based on the frequency of use, as shown below:  

  • Daily Active Users (DAU): Users who interact with your app at least once per day.

  • Weekly Active Users (WAU): Users who engage with your app at least once per week.

  • Monthly Active Users (MAU): Users who use your app at least once per month.

You can also define your active users based on what they do on your app. 

  • Do they log in? 

  • Do they complete a task? 

  • Do they interact with specific features?

  • How much time do they spend in the app?

Step 2: Track active users

Based on how you’ve defined your active users in Step 1, you can determine which users are “active.” The next step is to monitor them. This involves continuously tracking user activity to gather data on their engagement and behavior. 

You can do this with the help of an excellent user analytic tool like UXCam. Our tool’s real-time analytics and dashboard features can help you track active users based on your criteria. 

For example, if you’ve defined it based on frequency, you can check your daily, weekly, and monthly active users on UXCam and see how many visits they had within that period. 

UXCam Overview new UI

Similarly, if you’ve defined your active user based on their actions within your app, you can track them with UXCam. 

For example, if your active user is a user who visited your app and added a product to the cart, you can create a segment that includes these defined actions and measure it, all from a single dashboard. 

User segmentation example - Geograhpical segmentation

Step 3: Set up continuous monitoring

Now that you know your active users and how to track them, you need to monitor them continuously. You must regularly review the data on these users for insights into user retention, engagement, and growth over time. This will help you grow your active user base and find the best ways to improve your app over time. 

Using UXCam, you can automatically save segments based on the criteria for active users that you set in Step 2. 

For example, suppose you’ve defined your active user as someone who logged into your app and added a product to the cart. Then, you can create a saved segment on your analytics dashboard with these conditions. 

Our tool will now monitor this segment of users to see how many completed that action daily, weekly, or monthly. You can also see how these metrics change over time. 

Mobile app KPI Dashboard DAU MAU

Example of monthly active users, daily active users, and daily active users over time.

Best practices for finding active users of an app

Here are a few best practices you can adopt when finding an app’s active users. .

Understand your “active user”

Identify the specific user actions and behaviors that define activity within your app. This could include frequent logins, completing tasks, or engaging with key features. By pinpointing these actions, you can accurately categorize and monitor genuinely engaged users. 

Track active users properly

Tracking your app’s active users is key to making informed decisions about user engagement and retention. A few ways to ensure this include using the right tools, monitoring trends, and validating data regularly.  

Act on the collected data

Regularly update features, fix problems, and improve the user experience based on what you learn from your user data. This will result in an improved app and happier users. 

Know your active users today

Finding and keeping track of your active users is a big part of improving both your app and user retention rates. Tools like UXCam can offer insights that allow you to better understand your users and improve their experience. 

Sign up today to start identifying and tracking your active users.

You might also be interested on this;

How to grow active users (DAU, WAU, MAU) in your mobile app

How to Figure Out Why Your Apps Keep Crashing

Best Practices for Error Handling in React Applications

User adoption strategy - How to win & keep loyal app users

How to use mobile app funnel analytics to convert more users

The most important mobile app analytics metrics to measure

Product adoption dashboard examples & key metrics to track

AUTHOR

Tope Longe
Tope Longe

Growth Manager

Ardent technophile exploring the world of mobile app product management at UXCam.

Get the latest from UXCam

Stay up-to-date with UXCam's latest features, insights, and industry news for an exceptional user experience.

Related articles

Product best practices

What is Product Engagement? (and How to Improve it)

Learn the essence of product engagement and explore strategies to enhance user interaction, fostering loyalty and driving...

Tope Longe
Tope Longe

Growth Manager

Product best practices

Android Crash Reporting - Best Tools 2024

Crash reporting tools and best practices for...

Jonas Kurzweg
Jonas Kurzweg

Growth Lead

Product best practices

5 best user behavioral analytics tools for mobile app teams

Behavioral analytics offers deep insights into user interaction. Learn about the best behavioral analytics tools to optimize the user experience on your mobile...

Jonas Kurzweg
Jonas Kurzweg

Growth Lead

UXCam logo

Products

Compliance

    Logo SOC2

    UXCam has successfully completed a SOC 2 Type 2 examination by Johanson Group.

CONNECT WITH US:

© 2024 UXCam. All rights reserved.

Privacy policy.

Terms of service.