Why your 'active users' metric might be lying to you
Original: What's an Active User?
CJ Gustafson
May 29, 2025
6 min read
Article
Intermediate
Summary
Analyzing the gross-margin contribution of a customer over their expected lifetime, including retention curves, discount rates, cohort LTV, and probabilistic vs. deterministic models. Understanding how to leverage LTV to optimize customer acquisition and inform revenue forecasting.
Who This Is For
Product Analysts
Product Managers
Growth Marketers
Key Takeaways
- Define active users beyond simple logins by requiring meaningful engagement with core product value
- Choose measurement periods (daily, weekly, monthly) that match your users' natural behavior patterns, not what competitors do
- Segment active users into buckets like new, current, and reactivated users to create targeted retention strategies
- Track specific behavioral milestones that correlate with high retention rates to optimize onboarding flows
- Use growth accounting frameworks to understand not just how many active users you have, but who they are and where they came from
Tools & Technologies
Strava platform Growth accounting frameworks User retention tracking systems Product analytics platforms
Topics Covered
customer-lifetime-value retention-metrics revenue-forecasting unit-economics
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