Monthly User Growth
Monthly growth in an online community refers to the percentage increase in the number of active users over the course of a month. It provides a measure of how well the community is attracting and retaining users on a monthly basis.
Question answered by the metric
How many users have started participating over a month?
Steps to measure
- Determine the number of active users at the beginning of the month.
- Count the number of active users by the end of the month.
- Get the number of new active users over the month by subtracting the number of active users at the end of the month from what you had at the beginning of the month.
- Divide the number of new active users by the total active users at the beginning of the month.
- Multiply the result by 100 to get the growth rate as a percentage.
Interpretation
It is important to remember that monthly user growth shows the change month-on-month as a percentage. It means that:
- At the very beginning of a community’s life, the metric value is usually high.
- As the community grows, the value begins to tend to values close to zero.
- In general, the smaller the community, the greater the variability in the metric value. In large communities, the metric value will change very slowly.
Our job as community managers is to strive to ensure that the metric value is greater than zero. A negative metric value signals user churn and the community is dying out. At the same time, if your community has a seasonal effect, you may see negative values during low activity periods.