Stickiness
AnalyticsAlso: DAU/MAU Ratio · DAU MAU · Engagement Ratio
Quick definition
Stickiness is the ratio of Daily Active Users (DAU) to Monthly Active Users (MAU), expressed as a percentage. It measures how often your monthly users return on a given day. A higher ratio means users come back more frequently. It is most useful for products where daily or near-daily use is a natural expectation.
Use a typical or average DAU, not your peak day. Peak-day DAU inflates the ratio and makes the trend unreadable. Judge the output against your own historical line and your product's natural use frequency.
How it varies across Australia
Stickiness varies significantly by product type. Tools people open every day for work sit well above tools people check weekly or monthly. Comparing a project management app to a tax filing product on this metric tells you nothing useful. The benchmark that matters is your own trend line, not a number from a slide deck.
See engagement patterns across Australian digital products →What it actually means
Think of stickiness like a coffee shop. Monthly active users are everyone who visited at least once this month. Daily active users are everyone who came in today. If the same people are coming back every day, stickiness is high. If the same people visit once and disappear for weeks, stickiness is low. The ratio captures the habit strength of your product.
Stickiness is one of the better leading indicators of retention. A product people use daily is a product people keep paying for. A product people log into once a month to tick a box is a product one cancellation notice away from churn.
The metric comes from consumer social apps where daily use was the design goal. It migrated into SaaS dashboards and product analytics, where it sometimes makes sense and sometimes does not. A tax software product probably should not be sticky in the DAU/MAU sense. A messaging tool probably should.
Defining 'active' is where most stickiness numbers fall apart. A user who opens an app and immediately closes it is not the same as a user who completes a core action. Before reading the ratio, nail down what active actually means for your product.
Stickiness tells you whether users like your product enough to come back tomorrow, not just whether they signed up.
How to calculate it
Stickiness = DAU ÷ MAU × 100
Worked example. Your product had 8,400 Monthly Active Users (MAU) in April. On a typical day in April, 2,100 users were active. Stickiness = 2,100 ÷ 8,400 × 100 = 25%. That means on any given day, roughly one in four monthly users shows up.
The Australian context
Australian SaaS and app businesses often benchmark against US consumer product figures, which skews expectations. Consumer social apps and productivity tools in the US operate at usage volumes that produce stable daily averages. Australian products at smaller scale see more day-to-day variance in DAU, which makes the ratio noisier. Use a rolling 7-day or 28-day average DAU rather than a single-day snapshot for a more stable stickiness figure.
Where people get this wrong
Related terms
Common questions
What is a good stickiness ratio?
It depends on your product. Tools designed for daily use should aim higher than tools people open once a week. The ratio alone tells you nothing without knowing the natural use frequency of the product. Track your own trend before chasing any published benchmark.
How is stickiness different from retention?
Stickiness measures frequency within a period. Retention measures whether users come back at all in the next period. Both matter. A sticky product with poor retention is one where users visit often then cancel. A retained product with low stickiness is one users keep but rarely open.
Can stickiness be too high?
Not in the honest sense. But inflated stickiness driven by notifications, forced re-engagement or interface friction will eventually show up as churn when users get tired of being nudged. Stickiness earned through real product value compounds. Manufactured stickiness corrects.
Where can I track stickiness for my product?
Most product analytics tools including Mixpanel, Amplitude and Heap report DAU/MAU natively. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) reports active users across daily, weekly and monthly windows, which lets you construct the ratio manually. Set a consistent active user definition before you start tracking.
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About New Rebellion
New Rebellion is a marketing intelligence consultancy. We build tools, score Australian businesses on how their marketing actually performs, and publish Debrief every day. This dictionary is part of how we work in the open.
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