Product-Sense

Collections of questions

Say DAU is increasing but MAU are decreasing (over 3 months period), how would you approach this problem and what data sets would you work with?

Let’s go over the definitions first:
DAU - The measure used to find the number of unique daily users for the game.
MAU - The measure used to find the number unique monthly users for the game.

Since you’re DAUs are going up, but you’re MAU’s are going down, it means that you’re undergoing a large amount of churn. Essentially, lots of new people are using the app everyday, but they never come back on a month-to-month basis.

Let’s confine the notion of a “month” to just 3 days instead of 30.

“Month 1”
Day 1: 1M new people login
Day 2: 1M new people login, 500k “Day 1” people login again
Day 3: 1M new people login, 250k “Day 1” people login again, 500k “Day 2” people login again

“Month 2”
Day 1: 1.75M new people login, *nobody” from “Month 1” logs in
Day 2: 250K new people login, 1.75M “Day 1” people login again
Day 3: 500K new people login, 1.5M “Day 1” people login again, 250K “Day 2” people login again

Already, we can see the trend occurring:

Month 1 had consecutive DAUs of 1M, 1.5M, 1.75M users - and a MAU of 3M people
Month 2 had consecutive DAUS of 1.75M, 2M, 2.25M - and a MAU of just 2.5M people.

The game is doing much better in terms of 3-day retention despite decreasing exposure. However, when it comes to monthly retention, we’re talking about 0% of users logging in the next month.

You’re going to have to first work entirely with retention data sets that show user session activity over the 3 month period. You’re looking for retention within the month including anything from 3-day retention to 10-day retention and then figuring out when/why users are dropping off within the month.

There are several factors that could lead a user to be heavily engaged for a few days and then drop the game. It could be that users are getting bored of content and are exhausting the game within a small time span. It could also mean that the game’s difficulty curve is rising too steeply. Given the data we had above, you definitely know that people get “addicted” to the game for a few days and then drop off; this is very important in focusing your initial direction on what to fix. Once you know the suspects, then you can delve into more game-specific data sets such as the difficulty curve or amount of algorithmically generated content produced for users.

product specific metrics
e.g. that if users added 7 friends in 10 days they were retained with Facebook.

Audience:
People or market segment at whom an advertising message or campaign is aimed.