The Activity explore has one row for every visitor and every day, week and month they visited in, and one for every week and month they went quiet in after one they visited in.
Use it for active visitors, growth accounting, churn and stickiness, such as DAU/MAU.
- Every row is one period's, so filter Period to Day, Week or Month, then group by Week or Month to read weeks or months.
- Status is growth accounting's.
A visitor is New in the period of their first visit, Returning in one after a period they also visited in, Resurrected in one after one or more quiet periods, and Churned in the first quiet period after one they visited in, counted once that period has ended.
- A period's active visitors are its new, returning and resurrected ones, so actives move from one period to the next by new plus resurrected minus churned.
- A visitor is a device, and a device first seen on a development server is no active visitor.
The acquisition fields, country and device are the first visit's.
Charts on these dashboards are built on the Activity explore:
- Retention and cohorts: Churn and stickiness
The Activity explore has 24 dimensions.
| Dimension | Type | Description |
|---|
| Period | String | Day, Week or Month: the length of the row's period. Every row is one of them, so a chart filters one. |
| Period start | Date | The first day of the row's period: the day itself, a week's Monday or a month's first, in UTC, and its ISO week and month. A date range on it chooses the periods. Time intervals: Day, Week, Month. |
| Week | Date | The ISO week, from Monday, of a day's or a week's row; empty on a month's. A week's row, and its days', group by it. |
| Month | Date | The month of the row's period, a week's being its Monday's. A month's row, and its days', group by it. |
| Period complete | Boolean | Whether the row's period has ended. A visitor not yet back in the current week or month may still come back, so a chart of growth reads the periods that have ended. |
| Dimension | Type | Description |
|---|
| Status | String | On a week's or a month's row, the visitor's status in it: New in the period of their first visit, Returning after a period they also visited in, Resurrected after one or more quiet periods, Churned in the first quiet period after one they visited in. Empty on a day's row. |
| Visited | Boolean | Whether the visitor visited in the period: false only on a Churned row. |
| Days with a visit | Number | How many days of the week or the month the visitor visited on: 1 on a day's row, 0 on a Churned one. |
| Periods until back | Number | On a Churned row, how many periods after the one they went quiet in the visitor came back in: 1 for the very next. Empty while they have not come back. |
| Dimension | Type | Description |
|---|
| Acquisition channel | String | How the visitor's first visit arrived, by the rules of Channel in the page view explore: the channel that acquired them. |
| Acquisition source | String | Where the first visit came from, as the Visits explore's Source reads it. |
| Acquisition medium | String | How the first visit came, as the Visits explore's Medium reads it. |
| Acquisition campaign | String | The campaign the first visit's link carried. |
| Acquisition campaign ID | String | The ad platform's campaign id the first visit's link carried as utm_id. |
| Landing page type | String | The page type of the page the first visit landed on. |
| Device id kept | String | How long the visitor's browser keeps the device cookie between visits: 7 days on Safari and on every browser on iOS, longer elsewhere. A visitor there who comes back after a longer gap is counted as churned and then as new. |
| Dimension | Type | Description |
|---|
| Country | String | The visitor's country as a two-letter code, such as GB, from their IP address. IP Geolocation by DB-IP (https://db-ip.com/), CC-BY 4.0. A dashboard showing this must display that attribution. |
| Country name | String | The country's name in English, as the Unicode CLDR gives it, read from Country's code; a code CLDR does not name reads as itself. IP Geolocation by DB-IP (https://db-ip.com/), CC-BY 4.0. A dashboard showing this must display that attribution. |
| Continent | String | One of seven continents, read from Country by the UN's regions: North America includes Central America and the Caribbean. Russia is Europe; Turkey, Cyprus, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan are Asia, as the UN files them. IP Geolocation by DB-IP (https://db-ip.com/), CC-BY 4.0. A dashboard showing this must display that attribution. |
| Dimension | Type | Description |
|---|
| Device class | String | Bucketed from window width, not from the User-Agent. A narrow desktop window reads as mobile, which is the honest answer for a layout question; Device type answers the hardware one. |
| Dimension | Type | Description |
|---|
| Device type | String | Desktop, mobile, tablet or smart tv, from the User-Agent header, and unknown where it names no platform: the hardware, where Device class is the layout the window's width gives. A tablet asking for desktop sites, as Safari on iPad does by default, reads as desktop. |
| Browser | String | The browser, from the User-Agent header. A browser built on Chromium that does not name itself there, such as Brave, Arc or a desktop app, reads as Chrome. A page opened inside an app reads as the app where it names itself, such as Instagram or the Google app, and as In-app browser where it does not. An app's own screens, from Kontala's SDK, read as App. |
| Operating system | String | The operating system, from the User-Agent header; iOS includes iPadOS. There is no version beside it, because browsers freeze theirs: Windows 11 reports Windows 10 and every Mac reports macOS 10.15. An iPad asking for desktop sites, as Safari on iPad does by default, reads as macOS, and many Android tablets read as Linux the same way. |
| Dimension | Type | Description |
|---|
| Site | String | The property the event was sent to, read from the key it was sent with. |
The Activity explore has 17 metrics.
| Metric | Calculation | Description |
|---|
| Active visitors | Count distinct | Visitors who visited in the period: daily, weekly or monthly actives, as Period says. |
| Metric | Calculation | Description |
|---|
| New | Count distinct | Visitors whose first visit was in the period. |
| Returning | Count distinct | Visitors who visited in the period and in the one before it. |
| Resurrected | Count distinct | Visitors back in the period after one or more periods without a visit. |
| Churned | Count distinct | Visitors who visited in the period before and not in this one, once it has ended. |
| Churned (below zero) | Calculated | Churned visitors as a negative number, for a chart that stacks what a period gained above zero and what it lost below. |
| Churn rate | Ratio (%) | The share of the period before's active visitors who did not visit in this one: churned over returning and churned, which are exactly the period before's actives. |
| Kept | Ratio (%) | The share of the period before's active visitors who visited in this one too, growth accounting's gross retention: 100% less the churn rate. |
| Quick ratio | Ratio | Visitors gained over visitors lost: new and resurrected over churned. Above 1 the actives grow, below 1 they shrink; consumer products sit just above 1. |
| Reactivated within 3 periods | Ratio (%) | The share of the period's churned visitors who came back within the three periods after it, over those whose three periods have ended: within three weeks for a week, three months for a month. |
| Metric | Calculation | Description |
|---|
| Average daily actives | Sum | Visitors on an average day of the month, a day nobody visited on counting as none: read by Month, or for one month. |
| Weekly actives | Count distinct | Visitors who visited in the week, on its week's row: WAU, grouped by Week. |
| Average weekly actives | Sum | Visitors in an average week of the month, over the weeks that begin in it, a week nobody visited in counting as none: read by Month, or for one month. |
| Monthly actives | Count distinct | Visitors who visited in the month, on its month's row: MAU, grouped by Month. |
| DAU/WAU | Average | The share of a week's visitors on an average day of it, its average daily actives over its weekly actives: by Week, or by Month over the weeks that begin in it. 1 in 7, 14%, is a visitor who comes once a week. |
| DAU/MAU | Average | The share of a month's visitors on an average day of it, its average daily actives over its monthly actives: by Month, or for one month. Above 20% is a habit for an app; most websites are visited far less often, so read it against itself over time. |
| Days with a visit per monthly visitor | Average | How many days of the month a monthly active visitor visited on, averaged: DAU/MAU times the days in the month. |