Definition
DAU/MAU Ratio
The DAU/MAU ratio divides daily active users by monthly active users to gauge engagement intensity — the share of a product's monthly audience that returns on a typical day. Expressed as a percentage, it is a stickiness measure: a ratio of 50% implies the average monthly user is active about fifteen days a month.
Key takeaways
- The DAU/MAU ratio divides daily active users by monthly active users to gauge engagement intensity — the share of a product's monthly audience that returns on a typical day. Expressed as a percentage, it is a stickiness measure: a ratio of 50% implies the average monthly user is active about fifteen days a month.
- Stickiness answers a question raw user counts cannot: not how many people use the product, but how habitually.
- Planoda derives active-usage signals from genuine work events, so engagement ratios reflect teams actually doing work rather than incidental page loads.
Stickiness answers a question raw user counts cannot: not how many people use the product, but how habitually. A product with high MAU but low DAU/MAU is something people remember occasionally; a high ratio means it has woven itself into a daily routine. The metric is most meaningful for products that should be used frequently — communication, project tracking, social — and misleading for inherently infrequent ones like tax software or travel booking.
Interpretation depends entirely on the natural usage frequency of the job the product does. A 20% ratio might be excellent for a tool used a few times a month and alarming for one meant to be opened every workday. Benchmarks vary by category, so the ratio is best read as a trend over time within one product rather than compared across unlike products.
Watch for the metric's blind spots: the same definition of 'active' must apply to both the daily and monthly counts, and a thin definition (any app open) can inflate stickiness while masking shallow engagement. Pairing it with depth metrics keeps it honest.
Planoda derives active-usage signals from genuine work events, so engagement ratios reflect teams actually doing work rather than incidental page loads.
Related terms
- Retention RateRetention rate is the percentage of customers (or users) who remain active over a period — the mirror image of churn. Calculated as customers retained divided by customers at the period's start, it measures whether a product delivers durable, repeated value rather than a one-time hit, and underpins almost every other growth metric.
- North Star MetricA North Star metric is the single measure that best captures the core value a product delivers to customers — and that, when it grows, reliably pulls revenue and retention up with it. It aligns an entire company on one number, cutting through competing departmental metrics so every team can see how its work moves the thing that matters most.
- Vanity MetricA vanity metric is a number that looks impressive but does not inform decisions or correlate with real success — total registered users, page views, or app downloads. It tends to only go up, lacks context for action, and flatters rather than informs, making it a poor basis for strategy compared to actionable, comparable metrics.
- Cohort AnalysisCohort analysis groups users by a shared starting characteristic — most often their signup or first-purchase date — and tracks how each group behaves over time. By comparing cohorts side by side, it separates the effect of when someone joined from the effect of how long they have been around, revealing trends that blended averages hide.
- Activation RateActivation rate is the percentage of new users who reach a defined first-value milestone — the moment they experience the product's core benefit. Sitting between signup and retention in the funnel, it measures whether onboarding actually delivers on the promise that brought users in, and is one of the strongest early predictors of whether they will stay.