Weekly Active Users (WAU)
Date created: Oct 12, 2022 • Last updated: Oct 12, 2022
What is Weekly Active Users?
Weekly Active Users are the number of unique users of an application or platform that have interacted with it in a week. This metric is used to track weekly user engagement. Weekly Active Users includes both new users and existing users who have interacted with the application.
Weekly Active Users Formula
How to calculate Weekly Active Users
If, out of the 100 users of an application, 50 unique users interacted with it in a week then the WAU for that week is 50. This means that 50% of the users engaged with the application over a week
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What is a good Weekly Active Users benchmark?
The Weekly Active Users metric varies widely based on factors such as application type, user type, and application purpose. It is therefore more important to consider the context and look at desired target level of activity and trends over time, rather than trying to identify a benchmark for WAU.
How to visualize Weekly Active Users?
Use a line chart to visualize your Weekly Active Users data. This lets you observe changes in trend over time.
Weekly Active Users visualization example
Weekly Active Users
Line Chart
Weekly Active Users
Chart
Measuring Weekly Active UsersMore about Weekly Active Users
Weekly Active Users refers to the number of unique users of an application that have actively engaged with it at least once in a week. An active user can be a paying or non-paying user, for example, taking part in a free trial. Unique users can be identified by a username, an email, or a user id.
Frequency of application usage can vary depending on the nature of the application, the context of usage, and the role of the user. In general, examples of applications used weekly include forums and online communities, and some analytics tools.
The Weekly Active User metric indicates the stickiness of an application with individual users. Low or declining user activity can be an early warning sign of potential churn, because it can indicate that users are not using the application often enough to receive ongoing value from it.
It is important to differentiate between tracking the weekly active users and weekly active accounts of an application because users are a subset of accounts, for most SaaS applications. Analyzing active users can highlight how valuable the application is to multiple unique users of an account as opposed to just the account level engagement.
Tracking WAU can bring value by highlighting the activities or features of an application that get used regularly, therefore bringing value to the customer. Conversely, tracking those features of the application that are determined to be the most useful can help predict future retention and churn.
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