Measuring App User Activity

Active Users and Customer Retention are cards found on your Summary dashboard designed to provide an understanding of your unique visitors as well as what portion of your unique app consumers are repeat visitors on a month-by-month basis.  

Understanding the Active Users section

The active users section of the Alchemer Digital dashboard measures unique users of your app trended both by day and month based on unique “app launches” for a given timeframe.  

Sample Active Users card

Elements within the Active Users card:

Average MAU – for the chosen dashboard timeframe, your app’s average unique monthly users as represented within the MAU chart. 

Average DAU – for the chosen dashboard timeframe, your app’s average unique daily users as represented within the DAU chart. 

DAU Chart – for the chosen dashboard timeframe, displays an estimated count of unique app users trended by day.  This data gives you an idea of your daily usage patterns and whether certain days of the week are more active than others. 

MAU Chart – for the chosen dashboard timeframe, displays a rolling month estimated unique app users trended by day.  This data gives you a longitudinal trend of your user activity. The slope of the line alerts you to upward or downward trends of app user activity.  

Understanding the Customer Retention Graph

To help you visualize and understand how your customers are retained by your app, Alchemer Digital uses a technique called “cohort analysis”.  In our Customer Retention graph, a cohort is defined by unique users of an app that launched it within the same month.

Cohort analysis and reporting generally includes 4 main inputs:  Cohort type (App launch), cohort size (month), metric (repeat app launchers), and date range (6 months).  Measuring these items together allow you to drill into groups of people to understand what makes them leave or stay engaged with your app.   

Regardless of your dashboard date filter, Alchemer Digital will always show 6 months of activity where the last “cohort” corresponds to your date filter end date.

An example:

If I chose May 21 to October 21 as my date filter, Alchemer will find all unique users for the full calendar months represented for that timeframe (May 1 – October 31) and group them into their initial cohorts. Next, Alchemer will evaluate whether those same users are present in subsequent months for each cohort.  The output is displayed in the following visual:

The common way of showing cohorts is through a specific tabular format designed for this purpose.  

Reading across a row, I can see what percentage of my users came back in following months or “user retention”.  

I can see that of the users that launched the app within June, 59.19% were still present 2 months later in August. When the last cohort (month) is still in progress, all comparisons are displayed in yellow.  In our example, October is a partial month.