Measuring the number of active players is vital to the health of your studio’s game. DAU (Daily Active Users) is the number of players that are playing on a daily basis, while MAU (Monthly Active Users) is how many unique players are playing over the month. The MAU can be measured on a 30-day rolling basis or on a calendar basis. The metrics serve as key indicators of player engagement and retention. When conducting marketing campaigns and releasing new features, the MAU can be used as a baseline. Then both metrics can be measured after the campaign or launch is over to see if there’s a sustained positive impact. The DAU and MAU are also important to track for your game’s website and e-commerce/merch store.

How they indicate game health

Healthy games have a good amount of DAU and MAU and have high stickiness, with players returning to enjoy the game or find out what’s new. The metrics can show seasonal trends and trends around holidays. A low amount of daily players can indicate marketing or distribution issues, while a low DAU/MAU ratio can indicate other issues.

Different types of games can have different measures of what a successful DAU/MAU ratio is. Single-player games that are bought once can have a low DAU/MAU ratio. However, that type of game can still have a high player satisfaction rating and can be profitable in terms of number of units sold. Multiplayer games and live ops games need a minimum amount of players in the pool for matches to take place or to populate the game world. For that type of game, the DAU/MAU can indicate whether there needs to be a boost in players with a marketing campaign or by updating or releasing new features. This is where quantitative data can lead to more investigation via qualitative means such as player surveys and reading through player feedback in game reviews.

There are limitations to DAU/MAU metrics. While they reflect on engagement and retention, they are high-level averages that may not correlate with the actual revenue performance or player satisfaction with the game.

Interpreting DAU/MAU ratio for engagement

The DAU and MAU ratio compares how often a player engages with the game in a day versus a month. If there are 10,000 players in a month and there are around 300 players in a day, then the ratio is 300 DAU to 10,000 MAU which is 3%; if there are 5,000 DAU and 25,000 MAU, the ratio is 20%. This ratio is a high-level view of how sticky your game is and how often players return to the game. A ratio of 3% is low, while a ratio of 20% is considered widely to be great and higher ratios of 50% are incredible.

Simple steps to start tracking these metrics

1. Define what an “active” player is: do they need to log in once and play a move in the game or play for at least a few minutes or take some other actions?
2. Track when they hit the milestones to be considered active in a day
3. Build a dashboard that tracks this number over 24 hours and the past 30 days
   1. Create charts to show the DAU and MAU
   2. Create cohorts and filters for player attributes to understand differences in DAU and MAU across the player base

Many analytics dashboards now offer charts of DAU and MAU. In Google Analytics, the “engagement overview” page shows the “user activity over time” with the DAU, WAU (Weekly Active Users) and MAU. Google Analytics is also a good example of defining what “active” means. They define “active” as a user who engaged with a website while it was in focus, and for mobile apps, “active” means when the app was in the foreground. They don’t track what “active” means beyond that, however, for mobile games, simply opening the game doesn’t count as “active”; the player needs to take some action in the game after logging in to be counted as active.