User

A user is a person who actually uses a digital offering, whether a website, an app, a platform or a digital tool. In analytics tools, a user is usually defined through a device or login identifier, which distinguishes them from a session. A session is a single visit, a user can produce multiple sessions.

Important distinctions

A user is not automatically a customer, because they need not have purchased anything yet. Visitor is the colloquial variant, treated as identical to user in analytics tools. From a privacy perspective, the user is a natural person as soon as identifiers like email address, login or unique cookie are processed. The GDPR obligations apply from the very first identifier.

Active users as a metric

Platforms distinguish daily active, weekly active and monthly active users. These numbers show how many distinct people actually use the offering, as opposed to mere registrations that may long be inactive. The ratio of daily to monthly active users, also called DAU MAU ratio, is an established measure of platform stickiness.

In everyday marketing

When building reports, you should cleanly separate sessions, users, leads and customers, because the terms are often used loosely. A campaign that brings many sessions but few distinct users may indicate repeated clicks by the same people. A campaign with many users but few returners shows that the offering sounds attractive but the actual experience does not hold.