DAU, MAU and Stickiness

DAU and MAU are your daily and monthly active user counts, and stickiness is DAU divided by MAU, a rough read on how many of your monthly users show up on any given day.

You launch an app, watch installs climb, and feel good about the monthly number sitting in your dashboard. But that monthly count only tells you how many people opened the app at least once in the last thirty days. It says nothing about whether they came back. To know that, you compare the size of your daily crowd against your monthly crowd, and that comparison is where the real story lives.

You do it like this. Daily active users, or DAU, is how many unique people used the app today. Monthly active users, or MAU, is how many unique people used it across the last thirty days. Divide DAU by MAU and you get stickiness, a percentage that answers a simple question: of everyone who touched your app this month, what share are showing up on a typical day. A social app people check constantly will sit high. A tax app people open once a year will sit near the floor, and that is fine, because habit means different things for different products.

Watch how you define active. The word means whatever you decide it means, and that makes it easy to flatter yourself. If active is just opening the app, a background refresh or a push notification tap can inflate your counts while nobody actually does anything. A high MAU sitting on a low DAU is a warning that people are not coming back often. Define active as a meaningful action, a search, a message, a purchase, not a mere open, and the ratio starts telling you the truth.

MAU tells you how many people you reached; stickiness tells you how many you kept.