Tracking user engagement is a prerequisite to achieving long-term app success. With Sensor Tower's Active Users module, you can identify app growth by users, determine engagement levels, and discover apps that users are engaging with.

Active User refers to any user who has at least one session per day, week, or month.

With a similar layout to Top Apps, you can segment Active User metrics by App, Country, Device, and Publisher. Active users by App can be used to compare active users for multiple apps side-by-side to measure user loyalty over time and see how often users interact with any app.

This graph compares WAU's for Facebook and Instagram. We can understand how often an app is used by configuring user period granularity between DAU, WAU, and MAU to compare these figures and identify how often users are returning to these apps.

It seems that more users are likely to use these social media apps weekly, adjusting User Period by WAU highlights the specific days when users are most and least likely to use any app. You can also compare the increase or decline in Active Users by Publishers to monitor overall Publisher performances. 

Active Users by Country illustrates usage trends in each country or region. Here you can see which countries have the highest or lowest average of active users to help determine app popularity. Looking at the same apps, we can see the countries where Instagram and Facebook have the highest number of MAUs. Make sure to include all sub-apps for entire country figures. Looking at the App Store data, we can see that the majority of MAUs for these apps are mainly from the US, the United Kingdom, and Japan. In fact, in Apr19-20, over 30% of MAUs were from these three countries.

Our Active Users by Device view breaks down which devices the user activity is coming from. For the App Store, you can compare overall usage on iPhone vs. iPad. You'll need to analyze the Active Users individually for each store to understand which device is most popular/has the most users.

Breaking this data down from different angles provides valuable information into any app's health and lifecycle. By checking every angle, you can keep your pulse on any significant growth opportunities. Engagement levels can also vary depending on the type of apps being used; for example, Utility apps generally have higher engagement from MAUs compared to WAUs for social media apps like Facebook and Instagram.

A consistent number of Active Users is an overall indicator of healthy app lifecycles and feature adoption, by comparing the two metrics, you can understand how beneficial any downloads were to an app's health- including retention and churn.

As mentioned before, the user period metric you track depends on the app type. For example, Hyper casual Gaming apps monetizing mainly through ads focus on increases in DAU's to maximize revenue or monitoring trends to show ads at the right time. While apps with longer life cycles need to monitor MAUs and tailor their apps to continue keeping their users engaged.