The Difference between Daily Active Users (DAUs) and Visitors?

Driving traffic and increasing the amount of "Visitors" to a website is a primary goal in the world of Video Game Marketing. Both Visitors and Daily Active Users (DAUs) are extremely important Key performance indicators. "Visitors" measure how many users visit a site per day. If the same visitor visits the same site 3 times in one day, this will be counted as 3 different "Visitors" for that that day. “Unique visitors” refers to the number of distinct individuals requesting pages from the website during a given period, regardless of how often they visit. If the same user visits a site 3 times in one day, they will be counted as one unique visitor regardless of how many times they visited the site that day. If the Unique Visitor visits a site on Monday and again on Tuesday that will count as 2 Unique visitors in 2 days.

DAU is an acronym for Daily Active Users. Essentially a DAU is a visitor that enters and engages a site or app in at least one activity, game, community board or other area of the app in a 24-hour period. Regardless of how many times these users play a game in a 24-hour period, the user is counted only once. The "Session" metric measures how many games a user engages in their time spent on a site.

Visualization of DAU and Visitor metrics can provide information on how many customers are using your site per day and their behaviors. Understanding and tracking these metrics are a good starting point for additional analysis. For these metrics to be an accurate depiction of a website’s performance, or the effectiveness of online marketing strategies to increase web traffic user engagement, deeper analysis is required.

For example, if your analytics states that a website had 1000 visitors in total: 500 of the "Visitors" could have visited the website twice in one day. That would equal that the website had only 500 "Unique Visitors" 200 of the "Unique Visitors" could have entered the website with an accidental click or search. Another 150 of the "Unique Visitors" may have entered and "Abandoned" the site due to lack of engagement in the site's games, mistaken site entry, website functionality issues etc.

That leaves 150 DAUs who entered the site that day. The number 150 DAU does not indicate how many times these users entered the website during that day.

Knowing the amount of "Visitors" to a site provides information on how many people are visiting a site per day. Utilizing the amount of "Unique Visitors" / "DAU" provides the percentage of Daily Unique visitors who are DAU. For example, if you had 500 Unique visitors in a 24-hour period and 150 of those are DAU, then 30% of your unique visitors are DAU. Understanding these metrics provides deeper insights into developing business intelligence strategies and goals.