How to increase daily active users (DAU): Tips, examples & 2025 benchmarks
Elena Montoya
One of the essential goals for any mobile app business is to increase daily active users (DAU), a key engagement and growth metric that acts as a pulse check for how valuable your product is to users. The daily active users metric reveals user engagement trends, helps define what an active user is, and simplifies tracking through unique visitor data. Monitoring DAU and daily active user growth is also closely tied to product health and potential revenue increases, making it a crucial indicator for long-term success.
In this blog post, we’ll answer your main questions on what DAU means, how to calculate daily active users, and how to increase DAU effectively. We’ll also equip you with helpful insights gained from the recent benchmark study covering multiple industries and two OS, and share tried-and-tested strategies to increase daily active users.
What is DAU? Daily active users definition
Daily active users (DAU) is the number of unique users who complete a meaningful action in your app on a given day — not just a login.
DAU is a crucial daily active users metric for apps, measuring the total number of unique app users per day. It’s a vital indicator that shows a trend of your app’s health, but it doesn’t provide a breakdown of new and recurring app visitors, nor does it give you reasons for an increase or decrease in the number.
Why is it important to measure DAU for apps?
Some feel that metrics like DAU and MAU are vanity metrics, as they’re just reduced to numbers. However, this is far from the truth. When properly studied, DAU can offer valuable insights for your app improvement.
To get a clearer picture of long-term success, it’s essential to analyze DAU alongside user retention rates, as the latter reveal how well you retain customers over time.
How to calculate DAU
To calculate daily active users (DAU), use the following formula:
Immediately, you can see the flaw in the metric: it doesn’t take into account whether a user who opens the app daily actually takes any meaningful engagement action. It could be more illustrative to track the number of users who have completed the specific task the app was built for. For example, in a photo editing app, that would be making some adjustments to a photo and sharing it on social media. But DAU is a simpler, more universal metric, so it doesn’t go into such detail.
What metric should you track besides DAU?
While DAU is an important customer engagement metric, it should not be used in isolation. DAU makes part of the stickiness rate calculation formula and, thus, is vital in app analytics. To measure your stickiness rate, divide your number of daily active users by the number of monthly active users and multiply the result by 100%.
Stickiness rate is a valuable metric that tells you more than DAU and MAU, taken separately. Rather than having new customers visiting and leaving your app every day, you want to have the same users opening your app regularly, and stickiness rate shows you the percentage of such users.
Nevertheless, there are app categories that should track DAU as a standalone metric. For apps that serve daily activities like streaming, training, messaging, and traffic checks, DAU is highly relevant on its own.
DAU benchmarks 2025: What is a good daily active users rate?
Different apps will have different DAU based on several factors, including the specific industry the app belongs to. According to recent Pushwoosh research, the industries with the highest DAU include banking, business, hypercasual games, and news, with median DAU above 5% on iOS and Android.
The industries with the lowest DAU, on the other hand, include hospitality, insurance, rewards and loyalty, and telecom, with the least standing at 0.71% median for iOS and 1.03% for Android.
It’s important to note that there was a notable difference in the average daily active users between the iOS and Android news apps — 9.01% for iOS and 19.57% for Android.
How to increase DAU (3 universal tips)
An effective communication campaign can help you grow active users, ultimately impacting your DAU and MAU, which is where Pushwoosh comes in. The platform enables omnichannel user engagement through push notifications, in-app messages, emails, SMS, and WhatsApp messages.
Through these channels, you can reach out to your users and improve their engagement and experience in your app (or your website if you have one). You can automate key communication workflows to increase active users, such as those for onboarding and activation, and deliver personalized experiences that keep users engaged throughout their journey.
Now, let’s check out several strategies and tactics you can apply to increase daily active users and make an effective DAU growth campaign.
1. Use out-of-app communication channels
In-app communication is undoubtedly vital for customer engagement, but it is not enough to keep a good part of users active daily. With tons of other apps competing for their attention, how is yours going to stay at the top of your audience’s minds?
Push notifications are a great way to remind your customers of the value they get from your app. In addition, emails, text messages, SMS, and even WhatsApp messages can be used to reach out to users who haven’t opened the app in a while.
These messages include abandoned cart alerts, incomplete action messages, and even inactivity notifications presenting new features, discounts, and even freebies to woo users and attract them back to the app.
Remember to use the channels within an omnichannel strategy as it is a proven way to increase app engagement.
A cross-channel approach is the most powerful: each channel plays a unique role in delivering value. Email provides context, push notifications nudge users back into the app, and in-app messages guide them toward the next best action once they’re inside. Together, they create a seamless experience that drives daily engagement.
A cross-channel approach is the most powerful: each channel plays a unique role in delivering value. Email provides context, push notifications nudge users back into the app, and in-app messages guide them toward the next best action once they’re inside. Together, they create a seamless experience that drives daily engagement.
Vernesa Ćutuk
2. Provide personalized in-app experiences
Personalize any message you send to your customers. You can use demographics, geolocation, behavioral patterns, and consumption trends to create personalized experiences for your customers with Pushwoosh.
Just the simple act of including a customer’s name in a brand message helps create a connection, so imagine how much more you can accomplish when personalization is built into your app.
For example, you can get shoppers back to your e-commerce app with relevant product recommendations, gently remind your customers of an appointment they may want to schedule at your place, or entertain them at the right moments — just when another gamer challenges them!
Personalization is about meeting users where they are, prompting micro-actions they can’t fail to achieve, and reinforcing who they want to become—whether that’s mastering a skill, building a routine, or connecting with the product’s purpose.
Personalization is about meeting users where they are, prompting micro-actions they can’t fail to achieve, and reinforcing who they want to become—whether that’s mastering a skill, building a routine, or connecting with the product’s purpose.
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3. Optimize your customer journey
Set a goal to be proactive rather than reactive in your customer communications. It’s more effective to anticipate churn when users are beginning to show less interest in your app rather than try to win them back when they are lost.
Empathize with your audience to understand each individual’s end goal so you can optimize their experience in your app. When customers receive timely support and relevant communications, they are more likely to stay active in the app.
9 examples of how to increase daily active users in your specific industry (and app)
The tips discussed above can boost DAU for apps in any industry. Now, let’s dive a little deeper into specific tips on how to increase DAU in different types of apps.
Games
- Daily bonus
Scheduled push notifications with daily offers and other incentives improve DAU for mobile gaming apps. Repeat push notifications with a custom frequency that appear on the user’s screen even when the app is not launched are great for re-engagement.
Bladestorm, for instance, has used broadcast recurring push notifications to propose a new bonus to gamers every weekday. This is how the game publisher increased both DAU and MAU, and we’re proud to say that their success was made possible with Pushwoosh!
- Automated broadcast promo
Promotional push notifications like “Claim your free reward” help to increase both DAU and MAU too.
Beach Bum, another Pushwoosh success story, achieved 3x DAU growth using automated messaging. With automated push notifications, Beach Bum has significantly increased its in-app purchases and customer engagement.
- In-app rewards
Rewards are also highly effective for mobile gaming apps. The rewards can take the form of in-app messages to thank the users for being active in the app. Stickers and bonus points are also highly motivating.
Apps that use gamification techniques can also use rewards to keep users motivated. For example, Duolingo gives users congratulatory stickers for milestones in their streaks.
Focus on adding value, not offering discounts, to drive long-term engagement and advocacy.
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- Behavior-based messaging
Event-triggered push notifications like “You’ve got maximum energy — use it now!” sent with Pushwoosh Customer Journey Builder can also be used to drive DAU based on real-time user behavior.
You can also mix it up by trying new things, like event-triggered in-app messages tied to new app features, events, items, or challenges. These can be sent to users who are unsteadily engaged, motivating them to open the app more regularly.
📚Ensure daily engagement, long-term retention, and growing revenue for your game app — use the insights and tips from our game apps research & guide
Always A/B test your communications because one message doesn’t speak to all users.
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Media streaming apps
- New content alert
Push notifications can be sent to users based on their preferences. Triggered events like content viewed or added to “watch later” can also be used to customize push notifications for maximum engagement. For example, “a new episode of your favorite series premieres tonight!”
- “You may also like…”
Based on user preferences, you can suggest more content to watch. Create a message like “[insert name of movie/TV show] fans also like [name of another movie/TV show]. Check it out!” and target it at the watchers of the named piece.
Test links and segments—crafted content won’t reach users if data doesn’t render or deep links don’t work.
Vernesa Ćutuk
- “Go on watching”
These are push notifications triggered by the non-completion of a movie, episode, or series. The message can be something like “Find out how [movie/series name] ends,” and you’ll send it to the segment of users who have started but haven’t finished the mentioned piece.
Banking
While DAU is not the top-priority metric for banking apps, it’s still important to keep users engaged so you can more easily promote relevant offers to them.
- “Check your expenses”
You can send push notifications to alert users of the amount they’ve spent in a given period. Invite them to check the full statistics of their expenses on the app. After they’ve seen the stats, you can suggest a relevant product, like a credit or cashback option for their favorite categories. Highly personalized offers like these are the most effective.
- Useful educational content
You can also share valuable information like finance tips and recommendations from the bank’s blog. Updates on bank products or news from partners should also be shared regularly with users.
These messages can also be highly personalized. For example, if a user has used the app to make a bill payment, you can send them a push like “How to save on utility bills.” If they visited the investment section of the app, a “Tips for investors” notification would be appropriate and timely.
Besides push notifications, you can use emails to deliver educational content, like Payit, a Pushwoosh customer, does:
Grow your active users with Pushwoosh
Start the journey toward increasing daily active users (DAU) with Pushwoosh. Our platform is designed to help you engage your customers at every stage of their lifecycle. With automated messaging and scheduled communication campaigns, you have all the tools at your disposal to reach your goals.
Join the 80,000+ companies from various industries using Pushwoosh’s tech-easy solutions for their omnichannel customer engagement needs. For any inquiries, get in touch with our team. Request a demo today, and we’ll help you create a map toward improving your DAU.
FAQ
What does DAU full form mean?
The DAU full form is daily active users. It is one of the most commonly used metrics to assess user engagement and product health in mobile and web applications.
What is a good DAU for a mobile app?
A “good” DAU varies by vertical, platform, and app size. Based on Pushoowsh’s study across iOS and Android apps in different industries, average DAU ranges significantly — from 0.7% (Rewards & loyalty apps) to 19.6% (News apps).
What is the difference between DAU and MAU? (DAU vs MAU)
DAU = Daily active users
MAU = Monthly active users
DAU shows day-to-day engagement, while MAU reflects the size of your active monthly user base.
Together, they help calculate the stickiness rate:
Stickiness = DAU / MAU × 100%, which shows how often monthly users return daily.
How do I track daily active users in my mobile app?
You can track DAU through:
- Mobile analytics tools
- Customer engagement platforms with built-in analytics dashboards
In Pushwoosh, DAU is automatically tracked in the Project Overview.
