Average Active Users Per Account
The stickiness metric hiding in plain sight — why multiplayer accounts retain and expand far better.
What is it?
Average Active Users Per Account is exactly what it sounds like — the mean number of active users across your paying accounts. It is one of the strongest, least-watched predictors of retention: multiplayer accounts are far stickier than single-seat ones.
The mechanism is simple. An account where ten people rely on your product every day has ten reasons not to churn and ten workflows to unwind before leaving; a single-user account has one of each.
How to calculate?
Divide the total number of active users by the number of paying accounts in the period. The only real choice is your definition of an active user, which must match the one you use for ARPU and engagement so the metrics reconcile.
Track it as a leading indicator: a rising average, especially driven by moving accounts off a single seat, tends to show up as improved retention and expansion a few quarters later.