What is app stickiness?
Used in a sentence: Monthly actives look great, but stickiness has slipped, so people are opening the app less often than they used to.
How it works
Stickiness compares two counts of active users over the same period. Daily active users are people who did a meaningful action on a given day, and monthly active users are people who did it at least once in the month.
The ratio estimates how many days of the month a typical user shows up. If every monthly user opened the app daily, the ratio would be at its maximum. Defining “active” matters: a meaningful action such as an order or a played video gives a truer picture than simply opening the app. Teams track it weekly and split it by segment and acquisition source.
Example
A regional news app has steady monthly users but sees its DAU/MAU ratio drift down. Splitting by cohort shows newer users open the app only on big news days. The team adds a morning digest widget on the home screen and a reading streak with small rewards. Over the following weeks, newer cohorts open the app on more days, and the ratio recovers.
Stickiness vs retention
| Stickiness | Retention | |
|---|---|---|
| Question it answers | How often active users return | How many users stay at all |
| Typical measure | DAU ÷ MAU | Share of a cohort active on D1, D7, D30 |
| Blind spot | Ignores users who left | Ignores how often stayers return |
An app can keep users but see them less often, or have a loyal core with poor retention. Track both.
Best practices
- Define “active” as a meaningful action, not just an app open.
- Compare stickiness by cohort and segment, not only as one company-wide number.
- Match the metric to your usage pattern: weekly ratios suit apps used a few times a week.
- Pair it with retention so a shrinking but loyal base does not look healthy.
How to do this with Digia Engage
Stickiness improves when users have reasons to return. With Digia, growth teams add streaks, reward nudges and home screen widgets triggered by user events, without an app release. Lokal drove daily engagement with streak mechanics and reward nudges. See how teams guide users to habit-forming features on the feature adoption use case page.
Frequently asked questions
- How do you calculate app stickiness?
- Divide daily active users by monthly active users and multiply by a hundred to get a percentage. Use average DAU over the same month as the MAU figure, not a single day, so weekends and spikes do not distort it. Define active the same way in both numbers.
- What is a good DAU/MAU ratio?
- There is no universal benchmark. It depends on how often the product is meant to be used. A messaging or news app expects daily use, while travel or insurance apps are used occasionally. Compare your ratio to your own trend over time and across segments, not to another category.
Related terms
Read more
Part of the In-app engagement glossary.