Active user is a term used to describe the number of users who have been involved in some sort of activity regarding a specific website. Due to the expansion of social media and online gaming, a number of different websites have launched and have attracted the attention of people from all over the world. Famous examples include Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and Mini-clip. However, it is debatable whether every website uses the same criteria for categorizing a user as active as every website may have its own concept of an active user due to different business models being used. This industry is growing rapidly and it is fairly important for companies to determine whether their website is successful or not and determining their active users is one of the most effective way of determining this.

Usage as a KPI

The number of active users are now seen as one of the most important Key Performance Indicators (KPI) in the social media and online gaming industry and these are measured on daily, weekly and monthly basis, depending upon the specific period used by the particular company. These websites have a primary objective of increasing their traffic so that their popularity can increase and they can attract different sources of income such as paid adverts. Finding out the number of active user can be useful to understand if they have actually been able to achieve this objective or not. These are measured at large by the extensive use of analytical techniques and procedures applied by the companies.

Is a User Really Active? 

Different businesses have their own unique ways of categorizing whether a user is really “active” or not. The simplest category involves users who have given a single unique response on a particular website being categorized as an active user. However, bigger companies, For instance, Twitter has a certain threshold of activity that must be carried out by an individual before being marked as an active user, while other smaller websites may go ahead with the single response category.

It can be a little tricky to assign a particular limit above which a user will be classified as an active user and this is achieved through continuous monitoring and with the help of using different software for artificial intelligence and also with the assistance of different statistical tools.

Determining the number of active users is indeed an effective tool for a company and is getting more and more popular day by day.