Stickiness (DAU/MAU)

Stickiness is the ratio of your daily active users to your monthly active users — DAU divided by MAU. If 1,000 different people use your site over a month and, on an average day, 100 of them show up, your stickiness is 10%. It compresses the whole question of "how often do people come back" into a single, trackable number.

Why it matters

Stickiness tells you how habitual your audience is. A high ratio means a large slice of your monthly users return frequently — the hallmark of something people rely on. It's a faster read than a full retention cohort: one figure you can watch each week. For tools, dashboards, or frequently-updated content, a rising stickiness ratio is one of the clearest signs the audience is becoming loyal.

A concrete example

Say your MAU is steady at 4,000, but your DAU climbs from 200 to 400 over a couple of months. Stickiness has doubled from 5% to 10%, even though the monthly headline number didn't move. The same-sized audience is simply coming back more often. That shift — invisible in the monthly total — is exactly the kind of change worth knowing about.

The common misreading

The error is judging stickiness against benchmarks built for daily-use apps. A consulting site or a blog people visit when they have a specific need will naturally have low stickiness, and that's completely normal — nobody reads your services page every day. The number is only meaningful against your own trend. Compare it to last month, not to a social network's figures.