MAU

TL;DR

Monthly Active Users — the count of unique users who took a meaningful action in the product within a given month.

MAU counts unique users active in a 28- or 30-day window. It's the headline engagement metric for most consumer and B2B products — a smoothed view of whether the user base is growing, plateauing, or contracting.

MAU is most informative when paired with DAU (to compute stickiness) and with cohort retention (to separate acquisition growth from retention quality). MAU growing while DAU/MAU is flat usually means acquisition is masking weak engagement.

Worked example

A fintech app reports 2.4M MAU in Q3, of which 1.6M used a 'core' feature (transfer, deposit, payment) at least once. Outside investors should always ask which definition of MAU is being used.

Common pitfalls

• Treating MAU growth as success when it's driven by leaky-bucket acquisition.
• Reporting MAU without retention context.
• Using inconsistent 'active' definitions across periods.

When this shows up in a pitch deck

MAU shows up on the Engagement slide. The strongest decks pair it with DAU/MAU and cohort retention.

Related terms

• DAU — Daily Active Users — the count of unique users who took a meaningful action in the product on a given day.
• DAU/MAU Ratio — The ratio of daily to monthly active users — a measure of how many days per month the average user shows up.
• Stickiness — A qualitative term for how habitual a product is, often quantified as the DAU/MAU ratio or session frequency.
• Cohort Analysis — Grouping users by sign-up period and tracking each group's behavior over time to spot trends invisible in aggregate metrics.
• Retention Curve — A chart showing what fraction of a cohort is still active week-by-week or month-by-month after sign-up.

Use this in your next pitch deck

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