At a glance
Daily Active Users is the count of unique users who triggered at least one tracked event in Amplitude on a given day. In product analytics it is the foundational pulse of audience size: how many distinct people are actually using your store each day, derived from Amplitude’s unique-user counting rather than raw pageviews. It is the denominator behind stickiness, retention, and engagement reads, so most other Amplitude cards make sense only once you can see whether your active base is growing, flat, or shrinking.
Calculation
Daily Active Users is the count of distinct users who logged at least one event in Amplitude during the selected day, deduplicated on Amplitude’s user identity so a person browsing across multiple sessions or tabs counts once. Vortex IQ reads this directly from the Amplitude integration for the current window and compares it against the equivalent prior period. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
A representative reading of Daily Active Users for a typical merchant on Amplitude. Suppose the card shows 8,200 DAU for today against a prior-period baseline of roughly 8,000, a gentle climb that tracks a small uplift in paid traffic. The 7-day window sits near 7,900 and the 30-day window near 7,600, so the recent days are pulling the average up. Now imagine the next morning the card reads 4,100, a fall of around 50% versus the prior day, well past the alert trigger. That magnitude rarely reflects half your audience vanishing overnight; it usually means a core event stopped firing or the SDK failed to load on a key template. Vortex Mind traces the drop upstream to check whether event volume and core events fell in lockstep (a tracking break) or whether sessions and traffic sources also dipped (a genuine demand drop). Ask Viq lets you ask, in plain English, “why did DAU fall yesterday and which events stopped firing” without building a chart by hand.Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Reconciling against Amplitude
Where to look in Amplitude’s own dashboard: Open a User Activity or Active Users chart in Amplitude, set the measure to Daily Active Users, and use Event Segmentation with the “uniques” measure on your tracked events to cross-check. The Dashboards section often carries a saved DAU chart; confirm its date range and any saved segments before comparing. Amplitude’s active-user counts are unique-user based, so match its identity resolution settings to the Vortex IQ profile. Why the Vortex IQ value may legitimately differ:
Cross-connector reconciliation: complement with sibling cards in the same category for the full diagnostic picture. For divergence investigations, use Vortex Mind.