Daily, Weekly, Monthly Active Users (DAU, WAU, MAU)

Use case

We want to know the customer engagement of our store. To do this, we need to use an Active Users metric.

Data modeling

Daily, weekly, and monthly active users are commonly referred to as DAU, WAU, MAU. To get these metrics, we need to use a rolling time frame to calculate a daily count of how many users interacted with the product or website in the prior day, 7 days, or 30 days. Also, we can build other metrics on top of these basic metrics. For example, the WAU to MAU ratio, which we can add by using already defined weekly_active_users and monthly_active_users.

To calculate daily, weekly, or monthly active users we’re going to use the rolling_window measure parameter.

cubes:
  - name: active_users
    sql: >
      SELECT user_id, created_at
      FROM public.orders

    measures:
      - name: monthly_active_users
        type: count_distinct
        sql: user_id
        rolling_window:
          trailing: 30 day
          offset: start

      - name: weekly_active_users
        type: count_distinct
        sql: user_id
        rolling_window:
          trailing: 7 day
          offset: start

      - name: daily_active_users
        type: count_distinct
        sql: user_id
        rolling_window:
          trailing: 1 day
          offset: start

      - name: wau_to_mau
        title: WAU to MAU
        type: number
        sql: "100.000 * {weekly_active_users} / NULLIF({monthly_active_users}, 0)"
        format: percent

    dimensions:
      - name: created_at
        type: time
        sql: created_at

Query

We should set a timeDimensions with the dateRange.

curl cube:4000/cubejs-api/v1/load \
  'query={
    "measures": [
      "active_users.monthly_active_users",
      "active_users.weekly_active_users",
      "active_users.daily_active_users",
      "active_users.wau_to_mau"
    ],
    "timeDimensions": [
      {
        "dimension": "active_users.created_at",
        "dateRange": [
          "2020-01-01",
          "2020-12-31"
        ]
      }
    ]
  }'

Result

We got the data with our daily, weekly, and monthly active users.

{
  "data": [
    {
      "active_users.monthly_active_users": "22",
      "active_users.weekly_active_users": "4",
      "active_users.daily_active_users": "0",
      "active_users.wau_to_mau": "18.1818181818181818"
    }
  ]
}

Source code

Please feel free to check out the full source code or run it with the docker-compose up command. You'll see the result, including queried data, in the console.