Many community managers report on monthly metrics that involve unique users, such as active users or contributors.
One of the most common questions that come up is how come when CMs compare
- the number of active users for April, May, and June and add them up manually
and
- the number of active users for Q2 (April 1 - June 30th)
you get different results? What the what?
Whenever you work with metrics that include unique users and add them up, there's a risk of counting users twice.
There will most likely be users who log in every month, so if you add up each month, your monthly totals will most likely contain returning users, who would only be counted once in the quarterly view since we're counting unique users.
For example, in the image below, if I add up the number of users who visited each month, I would get a total of six, while really there were only 3 unique users in the mix.
This would be true for any metric that has a 'unique' component to it.
Shauna
