I hear the question “what are your DAUs?” frequently bandied around. DAUs are a standard metric for comparing the popularity of social applications/games. However, interpreting DAUs as a narrowly defined metric is wrong. I want to attempt to define it in a stronger way than just “daily active uniques”. Just in the same way that Groupon have been creative on their accounts, it is possible to also be “creative” on DAU measurements. 

Daily: “Daily” is defined in a strong way; meaning 24 hours of time measurement. (Unless your app is being used on Mars, then you will want to switch this to 24h 37m plus or minus a few minutes depending on the day of the year).

Uniques (or in some cases Users): The “unique” component of the definition is currently robust: unique meaning a specific unique user (note: the “fitbit for dogs" whistle need two DAU counts: one for dogs and one for their owners).

Active: This area of the definition has the largest ambiguity. “Active action” is defined as an action that the user initiates by directly choosing to with a gesture of some sort e.g. doing a status update and pressing send or opening your app. “Passive action” is defined as the inverse of “active action”. The DAU definitions can be broken in layers of onion shells that range from the weakest interaction with a user to the strongest user driven action on your own home turf:

• Layer 1: User made a passive action that they were not aware of, without conscious connection to your brand (e.g. tracking of user time in the app with flurry analytics, where the user doesn’t know they are being tracked). 

• Layer 2: User made a passive action that they were aware of, without conscious connection to your brand (e.g. Company A using the foursquare API to power a passive action in company A’s app).

• Layer 3: User made an active action that they were aware of, without conscious connection to your brand (sending an invite txt msg for an app that is powered by twillio (with respect to twillio counting this as a DAU) or authorize.net processing a user driven purchase event).

• Layer 4: User made an passive action that they were aware of, with conscious connection to your brand (e.g. automatically logging into a website using Facebook Connect ).

• Layer 5: User made an active action that they were aware of, with conscious connection to your brand (e.g. a user might save their score inside a game but then store it into Heyzap giving rise to a “network DAU” measurement).

• Layer 6: User made a active action that they were aware of without conscious connection to your brand inside your app/site/content (rather than say on a network).

Layer 6 is the normal case that people report e.g. Path, however, sometimes is it fair to report layer 5 if you are distributed e.g. Disqus. Layer 4 is interesting as it borders what people will constitute as “active”.  In essence, one really needs the user to be conscious of your brand for one to use the DAU measurement as a KPI (key performance indicator). For layer 1, 2 and 3, companies normally use other types of KPIs that are not DAU centric. So next time someone tells you their DAUs or MAUs, you can ask them - how do you really define your DAUs.

Note: You can also apply this to MAU (monthly active users) as well.