DAU/MAU Ratio: Measuring Product Stickiness

THE MENTAL MODEL: The DAU/MAU ratio is a percentage that tells you how many of your monthly users return on a daily basis. Think of it as a "habit score" for your product. A high score means users are deeply engaged and returning frequently, while a low score indicates more sporadic, infrequent use.

HOW IT WORKS: DAU stands for Daily Active Users, the count of unique users who perform a key action on a given day. MAU is the Monthly Active Users, the unique count over a 30-day period. The ratio is calculated as (Average DAU over 30 days) / (MAU for that same 30 days). For example, if you have 10,000 MAU and an average of 1,500 DAU, your ratio is 1,500 / 10,000 = 15%. This means on an average day, 15% of your monthly user base is active.

WHEN TO USE IT: This metric is most valuable for products where high-frequency engagement is a primary goal. Three key areas are: first, social media and communication platforms where daily check-ins are the core loop; second, mobile games with daily rewards; and third, news apps that aim to be part of a user's daily routine. It helps product teams gauge if feature changes are making the product stickier.

WHEN NOT TO USE IT: The DAU/MAU ratio is misleading for products with naturally low-frequency use cases. For example, an app for filing annual taxes, B2B software for quarterly reporting, or an e-commerce site for large appliance purchases. For these, metrics like conversion rate or task completion rate are more relevant. Focusing on DAU/MAU here would lead to poor product decisions.

ONE CANONICAL EXAMPLE: A social media app has 1 million monthly active users (MAU). Over that same 30-day period, it averages 500,000 daily active users (DAU). Its DAU/MAU ratio is 500,000 / 1,000,000 = 50%. This is a very sticky product. In contrast, a travel booking site might have 1 million MAU but only 50,000 DAU, for a ratio of 5%. This simply reflects that people book travel infrequently.