title: Should one average Firebase Active User Metrics (DAU, WAU, MAU)?
body: <p>I am trying to understand whether it is better to report month-over-month on the current Firebase "Active" User metrics report (view graph below), or rather self-calculate and report the <strong>average</strong> of each of these metrics's values over a specific period. </p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/KEWSo.png" rel="noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/KEWSo.png" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>
  
  <p>At first-glance the dashboard shows you 1-day, 7-day, and 28-day active users for the month of December 2018, but it is in fact only the last day of the selected date range's values that is shown (on the right). This is great to know, but a bit misleading to compare only the last date's values for my month-over-month analysis. An alternative approach could be to self-calculate the <strong>average</strong> over the selected period:</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/QHb3i.png" rel="noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/QHb3i.png" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>
  
  <p>Applied to the Firebase Demo data set, I got the numbers below:</p>
  
  <p><strong>Firebase Dashboard:</strong> </p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>28-day Active users: 8661</li>
  <li>7-day Active users: 3874</li>
  <li>1-day Active users: 1111</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p><strong>My Calculated Average:</strong></p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>28-day Active users: 8762</li>
  <li>7-day Active users: 3663</li>
  <li>1-day Active users: 1112</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>The delta difference is small here, but I am seeing some significant differences on our application which has millions of active users per month.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Question:</strong></p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>If you are using Firebase currently, how do you report on it? </li>
  <li>Do you copy and paste the last day of the selected period and report on that for a month, or do you also average each of the 1/7/28-day metric to get a better representation of the month?</li>
  <li>If you average your metrics, could you please explain why?</li>
  </ul>