Stickiness

Stickiness is the ratio of daily active users to monthly active users, showing what share of the monthly base shows up on a typical day.

The plainest reading is in days: twenty percent stickiness means the typical user was active about six days out of thirty, so the metric is about habit, not audience size. The main trap is that the ratio can improve for a bad reason; if MAU shrinks faster than DAU the number rises while the product is churning, so both series must be tracked separately. Stickiness also only makes sense for a product with a daily use case; for something like renewing insurance or filing taxes a low ratio is natural and raising it is the wrong goal. Many tools list the same ratio under the name DAU/MAU, and it is not a separate concept.