How do you measure Weekly / Monthly Active Users?

[roisinkirby]

Hey all!

I'm looking for the most straightforward way to measure Weekly Active Users (WAU) and Monthly Active Users (MAU).

Our criteria for 'active' is posted a member who has logged in and submitted ≥ 1 posts within the last 7 or 30 days.

I'm figuring this out using User Exports both from Community Admin and Lithium Social Intelligence but it involves a lot filtering on my end with excel and then further sums. 

Can anyone recommend the most efficient (and of course) accurate way to do this?

[RobbL · Accepted solution]

I think the best way to do this is through User Reports in Admin Metrics. Click Community Admin, Metrics, User Reports subtab. Use the Activity Date Range to specify the range you want for the report. Also, enter 1 for number of posts lower number, and a high number for the top of the range. Just put in more than anyone will do. What is confusing with this report is that the Activity Date Range will not restrict the number of records. You will still get everyone. But the number of posts will be restricted to the number created during the Activity Range you specify. Export to CSV, bring it into Excel and sort on number of posts. Depending on the number of registered users in your community this can work well.

The issue with LSI in this case, is that we break out Conversations Initiated and Replies and don't have a single Posts metric for Members.

Hope this helps.

[JasonHill]

@roisinkirby

Yes, I do this with user reports. Quick and easy. 

Jason

[DanK]

Have you considered including other measures in the definition of active? We typically define a user as active if they have started a thread, replied to an existing thread, given a kudo or marked a solution. The fact they have logged in to take these last two actions, although not overt for other users is still a user showing they are actively participating.

[roisinkirby]

Thank all! @RobbL the only issue I'm finding in Community Admin > User Reports is that the 'Number of Posts' filter is not working.

No matter what numbers I put in, e.g. 1 -10000 the report pulls in contacts with 0 posts for the Activity Period set.

Is this working as designed? I can provide screenshots if that helps?

[Wendy_S]

Oh gosh, I have had that problem for a long time also. Never cared to report it.

Also because the response from Lithium is usually that LSI should be used as the primary source for pulling data since engineering is no longer fixing bugs in Admin Metrics.

[roisinkirby]

Is this because they'll be sunsetting these tools? This is news to me, just
finished onboarding with Lithium and had hoped to use Admin Metrics in
depth.

[roisinkirby]

It's something I"m in the process of figuring out /establishing.

Would you have any insight as to the industry norm for Support Communities?

If we set a goal for WAU (where a WAU is just posting) then that could drive incident rates.

So I agree there should be other factors to consider.

[RobbL]

Hi @roisinkirby. Yes that is how the Activity Date Range works. It is not a filter. It does not limit the result set. That is why it is set off from the filters which are listed in a set below the line. But if you compare results with and without engaging the date range, you will notice that without it, the number of posts listed for many users will be higher. With it engaged, it shows the number of posts per person, during the selected time range. By using the CSV export and bringing it in to Excel, you can then sort on posts so you group the people who posted more than zero times during that time range and just focus on them.

@Wendy_S, while there are relatively few times when I use Admin Metrics instead of LSI these days, User Reports remains the exception, as there is user information available that is just not available in LSI unless you are using the Bulk Data Export. @roisinkirby I would definitely recommend that you experiment with LSI rather than Admin Metrics. I think you will find that it provides a wealth of valuable information about your community. Just note that every metric is bounded by the date range set at the top of the page, which defaults to the most recent 30 days, but which you can extend to any six month period. One advantage of LSI, among many, is that every "views" metric follows current industry standards for calculation. Unlike Admin Metrics "views," LSI does not include crawlers, api calls or RSS feeds. Also, the ratios listed and the filters, provide many ways to look at your data that we have found relevant to communities.

[DanK]

@roisinkirby Admin metrics are a bit finickity, if you use the User Report Filters filters first and press search it narrows the data to users that meet those criteria. Once you have done that set the Activity date range and search again on those search results.

For some reason if you use the Activity date range filter first it never properly filters out based on the lower options. I find that if you filter the data first and only after that is done put a date range on it works fine.

Hope that makes sense 😄

@RobbL I agree for the most part, LSI is very useful for insights and as a bonus you can schedule reports. However, some of the reports have result limits. Getting member reports from the Content tab for example only returns 2000 results. If I were to want to obtain a list of active users over the period of a month this would be insufficient to the task.

[RobbL]

Yes, @DanK, I agree. Depending on the size of the community and the particular query you are running, that can be a limitation.

[MattDe]

Hey @roisinkirby!

We took the route of using the Lithium API so we wouldn't have to make exports repetitively:

 

  We automated the requests with a macro in our software, Alteryx, that fires off an authentication request with the provided credentials (v1 API, non-SSO) and uses the Community URL and Board ID to create the request to query a given board. We did a little parsing of the response and added a filter to the date specified in the interface. You’re welcome to use the tool if you like! It looks like the below:

 

You’d need a trial license to run the maco, but it should bring down all the data you were looking for and save you some clicks in the process!

Best of luck,

MattDe

[BrianOblinger]

Active Members should be a standard metric in LSI. If you agree, vote with your clicks and comments: https://community.lithium.com/t5/Product-Ideas/Add-Active-Members-Metric-to-LSI/idi-p/213082

As has been thoroughly illustrated in this thread, getting at the metric today is painful. @MattDe's solution is awesome because it doesn't require any repetitive tasks like exporting of files or manual Excel work. We're happy to build these and share as we go.

[melissapotvin]

thank you, this helped me.