DAU/MAU ratio — also called "stickiness" — answers a fundamental product question: of the people who use your product each month, what percentage use it every day?
A DAU/MAU of 50% means half your monthly active users are daily users. A ratio of 10% means most users check in a few times a month at best. The difference between these two products is not just engagement — it is business model viability, retention trajectory, and monetization potential.
Products with high stickiness build habits. Habits create retention. Retention compounds into lifetime value. This makes DAU/MAU one of the earliest and most reliable predictors of whether a product will succeed long-term.
The Formula
DAU/MAU Ratio = Daily Active Users / Monthly Active Users × 100
Daily Active Users (DAU) — Unique users who perform a meaningful action in the product on a given day. Define "meaningful action" carefully — a login is not the same as genuine usage.
Monthly Active Users (MAU) — Unique users who perform a meaningful action in the product within a 28- or 30-day rolling window.
The result is expressed as a percentage. The theoretical maximum is 100% (every monthly user is also a daily user). The theoretical minimum approaches 1/30 (3.3%) if each monthly user only visits once.
Worked Example
A project management SaaS:
| Metric | Value | |---|---| | MAU (28-day) | 45,000 | | DAU (average) | 15,750 | | DAU/MAU Ratio | 35% |
By User Segment:
| Segment | MAU | Avg DAU | Stickiness | Notes | |---|---|---|---|---| | Free Users | 28,000 | 5,600 | 20% | Low engagement; browsing | | Paid Individual | 8,000 | 3,600 | 45% | Active task management | | Team (paid) | 9,000 | 6,550 | 73% | Collaborative workflows drive daily use |
Team users are 3.7x stickier than free users — collaboration features create daily engagement loops that individual usage does not.
Industry Benchmarks
| Product Category | Typical DAU/MAU | Top Performers | |---|---|---| | Social Media | 40–60% | Facebook ~65%, Instagram ~55% | | Messaging / Communication | 50–70% | WhatsApp ~70%, Slack ~60% | | Collaboration / Productivity | 25–45% | Notion ~40%, Figma ~45% | | Developer Tools | 30–50% | GitHub ~45%, VS Code ~50% | | B2B SaaS (General) | 15–30% | Varies by use case | | E-commerce | 5–15% | Purchase-driven; inherently lower | | Media / Content | 20–40% | Netflix ~30%, Spotify ~45% | | Fintech / Banking | 15–30% | Daily transaction checking | | Health / Fitness | 15–35% | Habit-dependent |
Key insight: Stickiness above 25% is generally considered good for SaaS. Above 50% indicates the product is part of users' daily workflow. Below 15% suggests the product is used occasionally rather than habitually.
Common Mistakes
1. Defining "Active" Too Loosely
If "active" means "opened the app" rather than "performed a core action," your DAU/MAU is inflated. A user who opens your app, sees the home screen, and leaves is not truly active. Define activity around core value actions (created a task, sent a message, ran a report).
2. Not Segmenting by User Type
Blended DAU/MAU hides the story. Free users, new users, power users, and churning users all have different patterns. Segment to understand what drives stickiness in your best users.
3. Ignoring Weekly Patterns
Business tools show low DAU on weekends. Consumer tools may show low DAU on weekdays. DAU/MAU calculated on a single day can be misleading. Use 7-day average DAU for more stable measurement.
How to Improve Stickiness
- Build daily triggers. Notifications, daily digests, or streak mechanics that give users a reason to return every day.
- Create collaborative loops. Products that involve other people (mentions, shared workspaces, social feeds) drive daily return visits.
- Deliver fresh content. Dashboards that update with new data, feeds with new content, or analytics that change daily give users a reason to check in.
- Reduce friction to core actions. The faster a user can perform their key workflow, the more likely they are to do it daily.
- Identify your "aha" features. Analyze which features correlate with high DAU/MAU and ensure more users discover and adopt them.
Related Metrics
- Churn Rate — Stickiness predicts churn. Products with high DAU/MAU have lower churn because daily habit formation makes switching costly.
- Activation Rate — Users who complete activation are dramatically stickier than those who do not.
- Feature Adoption Rate — Which features drive daily engagement? Feature adoption data reveals the stickiness drivers.
- Net Promoter Score — Stickier products tend to have higher NPS because daily usage = more value = more satisfaction.
- Retention Rate — DAU/MAU is a leading indicator of long-term retention.
DAU/MAU is a diagnostic, not a goal. Artificially inflating daily usage through aggressive notifications or dark patterns creates annoyance, not value. True stickiness comes from building a product so useful that users choose to return every day.