The DAU/MAU Ratio: Everything You Need to Know

The DAU/MAU ratio, or stickiness, is one of the most popular metrics to track in product analytics.

It’s a way to measure how often people are engaging with your product. The higher the ratio, the more people are being active on a daily basis.

But is it a useful metric?

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In this blog, we’ll…

define the ratio
show you how to calculate and analyze it
list some benchmarks
talk about the benefits and the limitations of measuring stickiness

What Is the DAU/MAU Ratio?

The DAU/MAU ratio, often called "stickiness," measures how many of your monthly users engage with your product daily.

DAU = (Unique) Daily Active Users. This is calculated on the basis of a given day. Sometimes companies might also consider the last 24 hours or the average DAU of the month. This metric captures daily engagement and reflects your product’s ability to draw users back consistently.

MAU = (Unique) Monthly Active Users. This usually means users active in the past 30 days, but companies might also calculate based on calendar months. This broader metric provides insights into your total active user base.

The reason you’d want to combine these metrics instead of using them on their own (like 5K DAU) is that you’ll see how attractive your product is for daily use.

You divide the number of DAU by the number of MAU and express it as a percentage. For example, a DAU/MAU ratio of 50% means that half of your monthly users engage with your product daily, averaging 15 days per month.

What Is an Active User?

Active users are those people among all your users that actually take advantage of their account of subscription. The exact definition of an active user varies from company to company. You need to decide what is a valuable action or set of actions on your platform that would count someone as an active user. Simply opening an app or logging in might not be enough, but it is for some.

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Let’s try to understand this through the following example. Imagine having a task management platform. An active user could be defined as someone completes any of these events:

Create or view a task
Complete at least one task in a day
Complete three or more tasks in a week
Spend at least 5 minutes a day on the platform

How to Calculate and Analyze the DAU/MAU Ratio

Step 1: Determine what counts as an active user

Step 2: Measure the total number of your unique daily visitors (DAU) that fill your criteria for an active user. You can calculate this either based on only one day or the average of every day of the month.

Step 3: Measure the total number of your unique daily visitors (DAU) that fill your requirements of an active user

Step 4: Finally, divide the DAU by MAU. Then, multiply it by 100, and you have your final result.

the formula for calculating stickiness: (dau/mau) x 100.

What Should You Do About the Result?

A snapshot of the stickiness ratio the latest month tells you something, but not a lot. Let’s see how we can get more out of this measurement.

The following tips are most relevant for tools that naturally benefit from tracking daily user engagement, such as communication apps or fitness trackers. For products where daily use is less critical—like B2B or event-driven tools— metrics such as feature adoption or MAU individually might offer better insights.

If you product is not meant for daily use, skip to the next section about benchmarks!

(1) Track Over Time

Monitor DAU/MAU monthly to identify trends and seasonal variations. For example:

A drop in the ratio could highlight user churn or reduced engagement.
A spike might indicate the success of a marketing campaign or new feature release.
Seasonal patterns can reveal when your product is most in demand, helping you plan updates or promotions.

If your ratio stagnates or declines, dive deeper into user behavior data. Consider collecting user feedback to identify potential issues, such as feature gaps or poor usability.

(2) Refine Active User Criteria

Experiment with different ways of defining an active user. The event(s) they have to complete to be considered active can be limited to varying features. See how much stickiness will change with different actions.

This can indicate which features users find most valuable or engaging, helping you prioritize improvements and focus your efforts on what drives consistent usage.

(3) Look at DAU and MAU Separately

The DAU/MAU ratio is useful, but examining the components individually provides deeper insights:

Compare DAU to MAU to see if users are sticking around. A high DAU with stagnant or dropping MAU signals that users are engaging briefly but not returning.
Increasing MAUs indicate user acquisition, while rising DAUs reflect consistent daily engagement. A decline in either could highlight retention or usability issues.
If DAU and MAU are both strong, but conversions to paid users are low, there may be barriers in your trial strategy. This could mean:
- Trial periods being too short for users to see value.
- Missed opportunities to prompt upgrades at key moments in the user journey. Use surveys or interviews to understand why some users convert while others don’t, and adjust your approach accordingly.

What Is a Good DAU/MAU Ratio?

Well, there is no clear answer for everyone. Let me explain why.

The Bigger, the Better?

The closer you get to 100% stickiness, the more people are using your product every day. Daily users are likely to spread the word with people they know and make purchases. That’s why you’d want to reach a high DAU/MAU ratio.

The most popular everyday social media platforms, like Whatsapp or Facebook, have over 50% stickiness.

But most products don’t come close to these numbers. However, it seems the benchmarks have seen an increase in recent years.

Expectations Have Grown

In 2014, Sequoia Capital (a VC that invests in private tech companies) tweeted that a standard DAU/MAU is 10-20%.

Mixpanel’s 2017 report said the "elite standard for stickiness" among all verticals was 25%, and the average stickiness for SaaS was 13%.

However, Mixpanel’s 2024 Benchmarks Report states that across all industries, average stickiness was 37% in 2023.

By industry, this meant…

Technology: 41%
Media & Entertainment: 36%
Financial Services: 40% (compared to 10.5% in 2017)
Ecommerce: 29% (compared to 9.8% in 2017)
Healthcare: 30%
Gaming: 27%

… in average DAU/MAU ratio.

Why Some Companies Can Succeed Even With Low Stickiness

Some product types are inherently less likely to have high DAU/MAU ratios due to their usage patterns. For example:

B2B products like Salesforce follow weekday usage patterns, leading to lower ratios simply because users don’t engage on weekends.
On-demand services like Uber or Monday.com provide immense value but are only used occasionally when needed (for booking rides or accommodation).
Seasonal tools like Christmas gift planners may only see significant engagement during specific times of the year.

These examples highlight that stickiness should be evaluated in the context of the product’s purpose, audience, and typical usage scenarios. A low DAU/MAU doesn’t automatically mean failure if the product delivers value when needed.

This is why it doesn’t make sense to compare the stickiness numbers of two completely different products. However, benchmarks can be helpful especially when comparing similar, frequently used products.

Why Track Stickiness?

Your current active users are the key source of recurring revenue and upselling opportunities. Retaining these users is far easier and more cost-effective than acquiring new ones, making it critical to track and maximize their engagement. The DAU/MAU ratio is an essential metric for understanding how useful and engaging your product is to its users right now.

Benefits of Monitoring the DAU/MAU Ratio

Tracking the DAU/MAU ratio provides several actionable insights for improving your product and business:

Spot Retention Issues: Identify drop-off points or areas where users aren’t returning, helping you address problems and improve retention.
Evaluate Growth: An increasing DAU/MAU ratio signals healthy growth, indicating that new and existing users find consistent value in your product.
Predict Revenue Opportunities: Higher engagement often correlates with increased opportunities for monetization through subscriptions, purchases, or upselling.
Track the Impact of Updates: Monitor changes in the ratio after launching new features or fixing bugs to gauge how well updates resonate with users.
Compare Competitors: Benchmark your ratio against similar products in your industry to understand how competitive your user engagement is.
Analyze User Cohorts: Break down DAU and MAU by user acquisition source or feature usage to discover which segments of your audience are most engaged.

Active Users as a Growth Driver

Active users play a crucial role in a company's long-term success, especially for startups. Even if high DAU figures come from offering a free or freemium model, they validate demand and demonstrate a strong value proposition, signaling potential product-market fit.

For startups, a high DAU can attract venture capital, even when the company isn’t profitable. Investors see an engaged user base as an opportunity for future monetization, assuming operational efficiency and revenue strategies will follow. Once churn is minimized and users are actively engaged, the business can focus on converting free users to paid customers, creating a sustainable growth model.

Limitations of the DAU/MAU Ratio (+ Better Alternative)

As you might have noticed, it doesn’t make much sense to measure stickiness for products that are not intended for every day use (like B2B or seasonal tools).

(1) It Doesn’t Work for Non-Daily Products

For tools that aren’t designed for daily interaction—such as travel booking platforms, tax preparation software, or B2B SaaS tools—DAU/MAU isn’t a reliable measure of success. These products naturally have low stickiness because they are used only when needed, often a few times a month or year.

As a result, their DAU/MAU ratio will inherently look bad compared to different tools, even if the product is very successful.

(2) It Can Be Misleading

Tracking DAU/MAU without context can result in poor decision-making. For example:

Imagine a meal prepping app that people typically use on the weekends to get inspiration for their meals while they're cooking for the upcoming week. To increase its DAU/MAU ratio, the app sends daily notifications reminding the user that they should keep up their daily streak to accumulate points in the reward system. With enough points, they get a discount for cooking utilities or restaurants. While this approach incentivizes daily engagement, many users may log in solely to keep up their streak, without exploring recipes or engaging with the app’s core features, artificially inflating the stickiness metric.

High DAU/MAU might not mean users are truly engaged. For example, you could have a user base where only a few are monthly users and others are yearly users. If even one of these monthly users visits every day of the month, the ratio would get inflated quite significantly.

(3) It Gives a Very Simple Overview of Engagement

The DAU/MAU ratio reduces complex user behavior to a single percentage, which provides only a broad snapshot of engagement. For example, it completely disregards the users who are active but not every single day.

The Power User Curve offers a better overview of engagement with your product. It reveals patterns like how many users are highly engaged (e.g., using the product 20+ days a month) and how many barely interact (e.g., 1–2 days a month)

You can measure multiple curves at the same time to identify long-term trends, see even the slightest change in engagement after a feature launch, measure changes in engagement when it comes to different features or cohorts, and more.

The Power User Curve gives you more leeway and a more comprehensive view of engagement compared to the DAU/MAU ratio. We wrote a blog describing it in detail. You can access it here:

Conclusion

The DAU/MAU ratio is a useful starting point for understanding user engagement, offering a simple snapshot of how often users interact with your product daily. However, its limitations make it less suitable for products that don't require daily use or for analyzing deeper engagement patterns.

By supplementing stickiness metrics with tools like the Power User Curve, you can gain a more nuanced view of user behavior, identify trends, and make more informed decisions to drive growth.

Whether you're tracking retention, evaluating feature success, or spotting opportunities for improvement, combining multiple engagement metrics ensures you see the bigger picture.