How stickiness works
Stickiness is the ratio of daily active users (DAU) to monthly active users (MAU), expressed as a percentage. You calculate it by dividing DAU by MAU and multiplying by 100. If you have 20,000 daily active users and 100,000 monthly active users, your stickiness is 20%. Read plainly, it tells you what share of your monthly users show up on an average day, which is a proxy for how many days per month a typical user opens the app: 20% stickiness is roughly six days a month.
Where retention rate tracks a single cohort over time, stickiness is a snapshot of your whole active base right now. The two are complementary. Retention tells you how well you keep a given group of installs, while stickiness tells you how habitual your live user base is this month.
Why stickiness matters
Stickiness is one of the cleanest measures of habit. Apps that people open daily, like messaging or social, tend to score high, while apps used for occasional tasks score lower by nature, and that is fine. The metric is most useful tracked against yourself over time: a rising DAU/MAU ratio means your users are building a stronger habit, while a falling one warns that engagement is thinning even if your total user count is growing.
As a rough guide, a DAU/MAU ratio above 20% is generally considered good for most app categories, and the strongest daily-use apps push well beyond 50%. But the right target depends heavily on what your app is for, so compare against your own category and your own trend rather than a universal number.
Using stickiness with retention
Stickiness works best alongside cohort retention and the retention curve. Stickiness flags whether your active users are engaged day to day; retention shows whether new cohorts are surviving; and the retention curve shows where loyalty stabilises. Read together, they tell you both how many users you keep and how intensely those users engage.