What are active users?
Active users is the count of people who used your product at least once in the period you're looking at.
If forty different people opened your product in the last 30 days, your active users number is 40. Someone who came back nine times still counts once. It is a count of people, not visits.
Every other user metric on your dashboard is built on this one. Repeat rate, churn and sessions per user all start with the same population, so it's worth knowing exactly who is in it.
Who gets counted
Only people your product has told us about by name or ID.
Someone who lands on your app and never signs in is a visitor, not a user. We can't tell one visitor from another reliably, so counting them would inflate the number with the same person appearing twice.
The moment a visitor identifies themselves, their earlier visits get attached to them. Nothing before the signup is lost. It just gets credited to a real person instead of an unknown browser.
What the number is good for
Active users tells you the size of your audience right now. It does not tell you whether that audience likes the product.
A number that grows every week can hide a leaky product, because new signups replace people quietly leaving. Look at it next to repeat rate and churn so you can see which part of the number is habit and which part is traffic.
The window matters. A 7-day count and a 90-day count of the same product will be very different numbers, and both are correct. Compare like for like.
What good looks like
Below 50 users total, treat the number as a sample, not a measurement. Meterio treats that as the empathy stage: you are still learning what people need, and metrics move too much to steer by.
Between 50 and a few hundred, the number is worth watching weekly. Above that, it starts responding to what you actually change.
Growth matters more than the level. Fifty users this week against thirty last week is a better position than a flat three hundred.
How to improve it
Fix identification first. If your product calls the tracking snippet before sign-in but never after, real users will sit in the visitor bucket and your count will read low. That's a wiring problem, not a growth problem.
Then work on the two inputs separately. New users brings people in. Repeat rate and churn decide how many of them are still there next month. Most early products get a bigger lift from the second one.
Is this DAU, WAU or MAU?+
It's whichever one your window is set to. A 7-day window gives you weekly active users, a 30-day window gives you monthly. Meterio uses one definition and lets the window decide the label, so you don't need separate metrics.
Why is my number lower than my signup count?+
Signups are cumulative and active users is not. Someone who signed up in March and hasn't returned since won't appear in a 30-day active count. That gap is normal and is what churn measures.
Does someone who visits ten times count ten times?+
No. Active users counts distinct people. If you want the visit count, look at sessions per user, which divides identified sessions by this same number.
Why do anonymous visits not count?+
Because we can't tell reliably whether two anonymous visits are the same person. Counting them would double-count returning visitors. Those visits do still count in engagement, which measures volume rather than people.