Stickiness

Stickiness measures how habitual a product's use is by comparing how many people use it on a typical day against how many use it over a full month. A high ratio means the monthly user base is showing up frequently; a low one means most monthly users only visit occasionally.

It is calculated as DAU ÷ MAU, usually expressed as a percentage, using a consistent averaging window (for example, average daily active users over the last 28 days divided by unique users over those same 28 days). A messaging app used every day might see stickiness above 50%, while a tool used a few times a month will sit much lower; there is no universal "good" number, because expected usage frequency varies by product category.

Stickiness matters because it captures habit formation in a single figure and is easy to track over time or split by cohort, segment, or feature. It is frequently chosen as, or fed into, a north star metric. The main pitfall is treating it as directly comparable across products with different natural usage cadences — a weekly-use product like a budgeting app will always show lower stickiness than a daily-use one like a social feed, without that meaning the budgeting app is less successful.