Stickiness measures how habitual an app is by comparing how many people use it on a given day with how many use it across the month. A high ratio means your monthly users keep coming back rather than opening the app once and drifting away. It is one of the clearest signals of whether a product has become part of a user's routine.

How to calculate stickiness

Stickiness = (DAU / MAU) x 100

Stickiness = (DAU / MAU) x 100

Stickiness = (DAU / MAU) x 100

You divide DAU, your daily active users, by MAU, your monthly active users, and express the result as a percentage. The number roughly answers a simple question: on how many days in a month does the average monthly user open the app? A stickiness of 20% works out to about six days a month.

A worked example

Say an app records 20,000 daily active users against 100,000 monthly active users:

(20,000 / 100,000) x 100 = 20% stickiness

(20,000 / 100,000) x 100 = 20% stickiness

(20,000 / 100,000) x 100 = 20% stickiness

That 20% means the typical monthly user opens the app on roughly six days out of thirty. Push DAU to 30,000 against the same MAU and stickiness climbs to 30%, or about nine days a month, a meaningful jump in how embedded the app is in daily life. The ratio is easy to track over time because both inputs are counts you already report, so you can watch it move week to week without any extra instrumentation.

Why stickiness matters

Frequent sessions are the foundation of both retention and revenue. A user who returns most days has more chances to see ads, complete offers, and make purchases, so stickiness tends to move in the same direction as monetization. It also complements Retention Rate: retention tells you whether users come back at all, while stickiness tells you how often. Read alongside your Engagement Rate, it shows not just who returns but how deeply they use the app when they do. A rising ratio usually points to a product that has earned a place in the daily routine, which is the kind of habit that compounds into stronger lifetime value.

How an offerwall lifts stickiness

Anything that gives users a reason to return daily raises stickiness, and reward loops are among the most reliable ways to do that. An offerwall creates recurring reasons to come back: new offers to complete, currency to earn, and progress to chase. When users open the app to check what they can earn today, daily actives rise against the same monthly base, and the ratio improves. The effect is strongest when rewards refresh often enough that there is always a reason to return.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Reading stickiness without volume. A great ratio on a tiny MAU can hide a shrinking user base, so watch both together.

• Comparing across very different app types. A daily-habit app and a monthly utility have naturally different baselines.

• Chasing the ratio with nagging prompts. Forcing opens with aggressive notifications can lift stickiness briefly while driving the churn that hurts you later.