Weekly active users

Weekly active users (WAU) counts the number of unique users who perform a qualifying action within a rolling or calendar seven-day window. Like DAU and MAU, the definition of "active" should represent a meaningful interaction, not a passive event like a background sync or automated notification receipt.

WAU is the most appropriate engagement metric for products that are not designed for daily use but are used more frequently than once a month. Many B2B SaaS tools fall into this category: project management platforms, analytics dashboards, reporting tools, and CRM systems are typically used several times per week but not necessarily every day. For these products, DAU understates engagement because users skip weekends or non-peak days, while MAU overstates it by counting users who engaged only once in thirty days.

WAU also smooths out the day-of-week volatility that makes DAU noisy for business tools. DAU for a B2B product will drop on weekends and may spike on Mondays, making trend analysis difficult without normalisation. WAU naturally absorbs this weekly cycle, producing a cleaner signal of engagement trends.

The metric is particularly useful for products with weekly workflows: weekly team standups, weekly reports, weekly planning sessions. If your product is built around a weekly rhythm, WAU is the natural measure of whether users are engaging with that rhythm.

Count the number of unique users who performed at least one qualifying action within a seven-day window. You can use either a rolling window (the previous seven days from today) or a calendar week (Monday to Sunday or Sunday to Saturday, depending on your convention). Rolling windows produce a daily WAU number that is easier to monitor for trends. Calendar weeks produce a weekly snapshot that is simpler to report.

As with DAU, the qualifying action must be defined explicitly and documented. For a collaboration tool, it might be creating or editing a document. For an analytics product, it might be running a query or viewing a dashboard. For a CRM, it might be logging an activity or updating a deal.

WAU should be segmented to reveal meaningful patterns. Key segments include new users (first week of activity), returning users (active in the previous week and this week), and resurrected users (inactive for multiple weeks, now active again). This segmentation, sometimes called a growth accounting framework, shows whether WAU growth is driven by acquisition, retention, or re-engagement.

WAU decomposes into the sources of weekly engagement: new users activating for the first time, existing users returning from the previous week, and previously inactive users coming back.

The tree shows that sustainable WAU growth depends on the returning users branch. New user acquisition provides one-off contributions to WAU, but only retained users contribute week after week. If WAU is flat despite growing sign-ups, the tree reveals a retention problem: users arrive but do not come back.

The resurrected users branch represents a recovery opportunity. Users who were previously active but lapsed can often be brought back through targeted re-engagement, product improvements, or new feature launches. Tracking this cohort separately helps measure the effectiveness of win-back initiatives.

1. 1

   Build features around weekly workflows

   If your product supports weekly standups, weekly reports, or weekly planning sessions, build features that create a reason to return each week. Automated weekly summaries, scheduled reports, and recurring task templates all reinforce a weekly usage habit.

2. 2

   Improve week-one activation

   Users who experience core value in their first week are far more likely to return in week two. Optimise the onboarding flow to get new users to their first meaningful outcome within the first few sessions. Tracking activation rate at the weekly level helps measure this.

3. 3

   Send weekly digest emails or notifications

   A well-timed weekly summary that shows what happened in the user's workspace, what requires attention, and what their team accomplished gives users a reason to click back into the product every week.

4. 4

   Reduce friction for returning users

   Make it effortless to pick up where the user left off. Remember their last context, surface recent items, and pre-load the view they are most likely to need. Friction at the start of a session is the most common reason users postpone returning.

5. 5

   Invest in team and collaboration features

   Products that embed into team workflows retain at higher rates because usage is reinforced by colleagues. If one team member uses the product, others are pulled in through shared projects, mentions, and collaborative workflows.