My forum is ~ 2 years old. Struggling to gain traction. I’m curious, especially for the every active forums, how high this DAU/MAU percentage gets?
Here are a few years of mine - most of the life of the forum. I’m surprised to see it doesn’t vary all that much. Perhaps it looks like a slight decreasing trend?
It’s a small forum. There’s only a very small growth trend in daily engaged users:
So, I have not so many users, and they seem to keep coming back. Maybe you have very many users, and most of them visit only briefly. But how many do stick around? Maybe your monthly user numbers are a better indication of how many returning users you have.
In fact we can see growth and stickiness, perhaps, by looking at both the weekly and the monthly user visits:
(Can’t show daily visits for this long a time period.)
2 Likes
Hello 
I think the DAU/MAU depends on the number of registered users too. It means if more people join the community than the DAU/MAU will can be lower easily. For example if you use a gate theme-component it will generate you more registration but the user stickyness percentage can lower. And of course there are the community factor. If there is a problem in the community, it will appear on the report too.
2 Likes
DAU/MAU
User visits
I think your numbers are going to vary wildly depending on the type of community/service you are running
4 Likes
The way I think about Monthly Active Users (MAU) is as a rough measure of how big my community is currently. Every month, this number of logged in users visits at least once. It excludes visits from guests who are not logged in, which is good, as those visitors are not quite stepping across the threshold. It also excludes all the people with accounts who haven’t visited that month. Those not counted may be members who are unlikely ever to return, or who come occasionally, but not every month.
The way I think about Daily Active Users (DAU) is as a rough measure for how busy my community is currently. Every day, this number of logged in users visits at least once. It doesn’t distinguish between users who visit every day and users who only visit once a month, but it does tell me something about how many different users are coming to interact in some way on a given day. Again, it doesn’t account for guests who do not log in.
So then, DAU/MAU can be thought of as how busy my community is (DAU), but it in a way that automatically adjusts to its current size (MAU).
Or you can think of it the other way around. Given how big my community is (MAU), how many of those users show up on a given day (DAU)?
In any case, dividing by MAU is what helps this metric automatically adjust for the current size of your community.
Different communities will certainly have different expectations for this metric. Deciding what you think good looks like for this number certainly depends a lot of your own understanding of your community.
5 Likes
I agree. I believe forums that exist to support a product (like software) or to support a service will probably have better odds of good engagement numbers over a shorter space of time. Especially if you write software with a lot of bugs, jk! 
Compared to a forum created just for general discussion and community around a topic. My forum is the later. There are no support threads about something sold or something downloaded or anything like that. Just a topic for discussion and community.
That said, over a longer period of time I’m of the belief that advantage will become less and less.
Because with forums no matter how long it takes, there’s a certain level of activity (activity threshold of daily new posts/topics) that once you get over that level, all forums, regardless of reason for existence, will find that growth and activity will follow.
March 22 of this year will make 2 years with my forum, it’s a slower grind to get those core active users. But the last 2 to 3 months it’s starting to catch on with about 4 or 5 members really enjoying checking for content daily and replying and sharing.
From their lead, that it’s caused those members from 2022 and 2023 to return and be more active, even if it’s not daily.
Or in short, some use forums to support their brand (product, service, etc) while others use forums to build one. The latter can be a bit more challenging to get going but the DAU/MAU can be just as good over the long term.
1 Like
Of course, this revolves around forum users, but still:
(I don’t understand how you guys are getting stuff measured out of 50 and mine is out a 100. Maybe I need to learn how to manage a forum and actually get one.)
That’s an easy one - it’s just an autoscaled graph. In your case the graph visits 0 and 100 so it’s full-scale.
3 Likes