DAU/MAU Engagement

The ratio of daily to monthly active users. Tells you how often your active users come back.

When to use this

You have a consumer or prosumer product with a daily use case (messaging, social, news, fitness tracking) and you want a single number for stickiness. The ratio is most useful tracked over weeks and compared inside your product category, not across categories.

When NOT to use this

B2B tools with a weekly cadence (project management used in standups, weekly reporting tools). Products with an episodic use pattern (booking, banking, tax prep). Products with a complete-and-leave loop (a wedding planning app, a one-time onboarding tool). For any of these, DAU/MAU under-rewards real engagement and pushes you toward bad incentives.

Inputs

DAU: distinct users who took a value-delivering action on a given day. Not "opened the app." A specific action.
MAU: distinct users who took the same action in a rolling 30-day window.
Category: messaging, social, productivity, B2B daily-use, etc. The benchmark depends on it.

Defining "active" matters more than the math. Picking a real value action (sent a message, completed a workout, paid a bill) over a vanity event (app open) keeps the ratio honest.

The math

Stickiness = DAU / MAU

The result is a percentage between 0 and 100%. 100% means every monthly user came back every day, which is a theoretical ceiling no real product hits.

A worked example

A consumer app has 250,000 MAU and 80,000 DAU.

Stickiness = 80,000 / 250,000 = 32%

A 32% is moderate for a consumer app (illustrative). Daily messaging and social apps hit 50%+. Weekly productivity apps tend to sit around 20-30%. If this app is a daily news reader, 32% is below the bar and the team should be looking at habit triggers (notifications people actually want, content freshness). If it's a weekly meal planner, 32% is actually strong and the team should focus elsewhere.

How pmtoolkit does it differently

We tier your stickiness against your app category, not against a single global average. A 30% stickiness is excellent for a B2B daily tool and weak for a social app. We also flag trend direction independent of absolute value. A 28% number trending up week over week is better news than a 40% number trending down.

Common mistakes

Using DAU/MAU for products with weekly use cases. A tax-prep app should not target 50% stickiness. The metric mismatches the user need.
Counting active sessions instead of unique users. A power user with 5 sessions a day doesn't get to inflate DAU.
Ignoring 7-day variance. Campaign weeks spike, post-launch weeks dip. Compare 4-week rolling averages, not single days.
Treating stickiness as a goal instead of a diagnostic. A 50% stickiness target with no theory of why users would come back daily produces growth hacks, not products.

Benchmarks (illustrative)

Category	Solid	Strong
Consumer messaging / social	40-50%	50%+
Consumer productivity	20-30%	35%+
B2B daily-use tools	30-40%	50%+
Weekly-cadence tools	10-15%	20%+