Weekly Active Users (WAU)

What Are Weekly Active Users?

WAU, which stands for weekly active users, refers to a type of measure employed in product diagnostics that indicates the quantity of different customers that use a digital media such as a platform or a mobile application within one week. The measurement provides companies with a possibility to determine whether the customers use the offered product on a regular basis instead of just downloading the application or creating an account.

WAU is different from the measurements showing the total number of sessions or visits as it measures how many different clients have shown that they have performed the action. For example, even if the user runs the application ten times a week, he will still be regarded as one user for weekly active users purposes.

In order to define the action, it is necessary to take into account the type of a mobile application used. For instance, when it comes to a gaming app, the action could be playing a game or finishing a level, while for a project management program, the action could be creating a task, updating changes in a project or working with colleagues.

How to Calculate Weekly Active Users

It is essential to set the reporting criteria, the activity criteria to be met, and how the unique users will be identified in order to compute weekly active users. 

Weekly Active Users FORMULATION

weekly active users = Quantity of users engaged in any activity meeting the qualification requirements in a given timeframe of one week. 

Let’s take a hypothetical mobile application as an example, where these statistics appeared after one week.

Activity	Number
Total registered users	10,000
Users who opened the app	3,200
Unique users who completed a qualifying action	2,400
Total sessions generated	8,500

When one applies an action and engagement definition to determine a qualifying action to perform in the app, a company can state its number of active users, which equals 2,400. Despite having 8,500 sessions of app usage, one needs to consider that not all of these sessions were made by different users as one person can be responsible for many sessions. The number of engaged people can be defined as 24% of the entire base of registered users as per the formula.

Rate of engagement = (Weekly point of view ÷ total number of registered users) × 100

In this case, this should look like:

(2,400 ÷ 10,000) × 100 = 24 %

This shows that there were only 24% of registered users actively using the app within this week, whereas the others could just not use the app yet. There two methods exist to measure the weekly activity, with the first one being the rolling method which means getting the qualifying users for the past seven days period. The rolling calculation is changing depending on the moment, while the second one is the calendar method which involves calculations for a specific week. The rolling method allows teams to closely monitor the creation of recent changes, whereas the calendar method simplifies the calculations for reporting.

Why Are Weekly Active Users Important?

This indicator connects the application of a product with the frequency of its use by consumers. It will determine whether or not consumers incorporate the product into their daily lives as it loses its relevance once the initial interest in the product is over.

1. Emphasizes Product Usage

An increase in the number of users who apply the product weekly suggests that there are more people who are coming back to it. Companies can find out if this happened because of the new product version, changes in the onboarding process, new feature introduction, or a good advertising campaign.

However, the figure does not specify the level of engagement. While one user could be doing an insignificant task, another may be applying several significant features at the same time.

2. Defines Feature Usage

Product teams are able to see how many users used certain features in the week after its launching. The product group can see how popular the feature is after the launching phase. For example, if a reporting software offers the usability of scheduling dashboards, knowing the number of users that made dashboards will show if it was incorporated into daily activities.

3. Supports User Retention Analysis

The weekly engagement trends may indicate that the customers take the advantage of the service; a constant decline may signify some problems with usability, inefficient onboarding, inadequate functionality or other varying customer needs. It is important that teams compare this data over periods of time in order to understand whether the clients acquired during some period continue using the service after some time.

4. Helps Make Better Decisions Regarding Products and Marketing

The companies can measure engagement metrics across different acquisition methods, channels, devices, campaigns, geographical locations and client groups. This allows identifying clients who continue using the product on a more regular basis after they sign up.

As an example, it is possible that the particular campaign brings numerous signups but in reality the engagement level is low because clients are not interested in using the service regularly.

What Factors Are Impacting the Number of Active Users?

Product Experience and Usability

Complicated interfaces that are sluggish and ineffective tend to prevent users from returning. On the other hand, smooth onboarding and simple workflow lead to better retention rates.

Importance of Features

Products and services that solve everyday issues have better chances of getting repeated usage from customers. Features should meet real needs of users and not provide unnecessary engagement to improve the levels of interaction.

Notifications

Informative notifications are a good way to bring users back. However, an overload of alerts can annoy customers making them either disable notifications or even uninstall the app.

Onboarding

Customers that know about the main perks of the app from the very start are likely to continue using it afterward. Onboarding is about helping users accomplish their first action instead of abandoning them right after registration.

Type of App and Use Frequency

Not all apps need to be used on a daily basis. Some applications like collaboration ones can be used numerous times during one day, while others like travel booking do not need to be opened until a trip is on the horizon.

Weekly Active Users Benchmarks and Statistics

Since the concept of weekly active users count has no universal definition which would apply to all application types or digital businesses, the most important pieces of information should be examined to establish a right benchmark for particular applications. These include product types, audience size, frequency of usage, and the definition of active user. 

Among the major weekly active users measurement rules are: 

• the time equal to 7 days applies to the weekly metric
• the time equal to 30 days applies to the monthly metric 
• the 24-hour period is the time for the daily metric 
• 100 percent weekly engagement means that all users from the comparative group are active 

24 percent weekly engagement means that 2,400 out of 10,000 active users performed action that make them active users. A single person will only be counted once no matter how many actions he/she has done over the specified timeframe.

Thus, such indicators can be interpreted in the context of measurement standards rather than performance measures applicable for certain sectors. Businesses need to define the target WAU based on their historical data and general expectations regarding clients’ use of their products.

Strategies to Improve Weekly Active Users

The number of registrations does not necessarily affect the number of weekly active users. Clients must be given enough reasons to come back and execute the necessary actions.

1. Optimizing Your Onboarding Processes

Make it easier for your users to understand what you offer. You can create short and simple tutorial videos, interactive presentations, informative messages, or step-by-step guides.

2. Build Functions for Support of Regular Needs

Identify repetitive activities of your users and make it easier for them to complete these activities. For instance, if you deal with financial software, this may be the process of controlling users’ spending, while in case of collaborating software this can be the process of updating tasks or evaluating the success of the project.

3. Personalization of Your Messages

Through suitable communication with customers, you can spur them to return to your page, but you should take care to ensure that they do not become annoyed with your notifications and feel exhausted after opting out.

4. Identify and Resolve Drop-Off Points

Examine the steps involved from the time users sign up to the point at which they have started using the app continuously. If users leave during some step or fail to accomplish any action, then it is critical to find out the reason for their decision.

Some tools such as session replays, funnel analysis, user input, or event-level analysis will help to expose usability problems and identify critical improvements.

5. Attract Inactive Users Back

Search for users who have taken some important actions in the past, but currently do not visit the application anymore. Depending on the users’ behaviors and preferences, companies can use notifications to win their attention and share important updates.

The effectiveness of an ex-user re-engagement campaign can be evaluated by how many users came back and completed important actions rather than how many notifications were opened.

6. Test Changes before Scaling

Run tests with the help of experimental design on creation of onboarding samples, recommendations, reminders, and product features. Compare obtained results with a control group and track weekly activity and negative outcomes.

A campaign which leads to a short-term rise in visits but drops long-term engagement scores cannot be considered a successful improvement.

Weekly Active Users vs. Other Product Metrics

The metric becomes more informative when examined alongside other indicators of product usage and customer behavior.

Metric	What it measures
Daily active users (DAU)	Unique users active within one day
Weekly active users (WAU)	Unique users active within seven days
Monthly active users (MAU)	Unique users active within a defined monthly window
Session count	Number of sessions recorded
User retention rate	Percentage of a user cohort that returns after a specified period
Feature adoption rate	Share of an eligible audience that uses a particular feature

Every metric represents different things. In this sense, DAU indicates daily user behavior and MAU shows how the site has been successful on the market for a longer period of time but does not necessarily show daily user activity as well. Weekly metric, located in between them, is also a valuable metric for platforms with repeat usage but not necessarily on a daily basis.

Active users with a daily metric are the number of persons who managed to qualify to be called active on a specific day, while active users measured with a weekly figure means people who qualified in the course of a week. For instance, too little engagement data on weekends for a productivity app, but the weekly figure provides rational explanation to what daily total numbers cannot explain.

Effective comparison of weekly active users and monthly active users might also help in determining the correct strategy for improving compliance and retention. For instance, having 8000 of weekly active users and 20000 of monthly active users one can calculate how active weekly users work out in relation to the whole monthly audience and learn the ratio.

Common Mistakes When Measuring Weekly Active Users

1. Counting sessions instead of users: Avoid treating an individual user’s repeated visits as unique users.
2. Using the wrong definition of activity: Logging just any page visit or passive action can lead to misleading metrics even though the user hasn’t interacted with the product.
3. Changing the reporting period: Switching from calendar week to rolling week may cause your comparisons to be less reliable.
4. Omnicreating user identification process: There may be variances in user ID on different platforms and devices, leading to counting users more than once.
5. Only focusing on only the growth of users: Having a larger audience can lead to overall count increase despite the drop in engagement.
6. Using activity as a retention indicator: Just because the user needs to be onboarded in a certain week doesn’t mean that they will return in the following week.

Keeping those points in mind can help avoid being misled by metrics, differentiating real product adoption from a minor activity.

Conclusion

Weekly active users is thus a viable product analytics measurement that shows how many people were involved with the product over a week. It is a measure of engagement, feature adoption, customer behavior, and improvement opportunity detection.

Nevertheless, the metric acquires significance only at the moment of precise specification of qualifying activity, systematic identification of users, and comparison of results across similar reporting periods. The combination of the data point with retention, feature adoption, user session behavior, and conversion figures leads to a broader interpretation of product success.

In the end, it is not enough to just commit to increasing weekly engagement. It is important to build a product that customers will want to come back to.

from Apptrove https://apptrove.com/what-are-weekly-active-users-wau-apptrove/
via Apptrove