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DAU/MAU

Daily and monthly active users, and their ratio as a measure of how habitual a product is.

Tech Entrepreneur · Product-Market Fit

Also known as: DAU MAU, DAU/MAU ratio, stickiness ratio

DAU (daily active users) and MAU (monthly actives) measure reach; their ratio measures habit. A 0.5 ratio means the average monthly user shows up half the days — daily ritual territory. A 0.05 ratio means monthly-ish utility — fine for tax software, fatal for a social app. The ratio’s meaning depends entirely on the product’s natural frequency.

DAU/MAU ≈ 0.5+:  daily habit (messaging, feeds) — expected here
DAU/MAU ≈ 0.1:   weekly-ish tool — healthy for its category, alarming for a feed

Benchmark against your category’s frequency, never against other categories’. And define “active” strictly — a login ping is not usage. The ratio built on loose activity definitions flatters while retention quietly dies underneath.

The classic mistakes:

  • Chasing the ratio directly. Notification spam and streak mechanics inflate DAU while degrading the experience that earned users. Grow the ratio through value frequency, not prompts.
  • Blended ratios. Power users at 0.9 and a dead long tail at 0.02 average to a meaningless middle. Cut by cohort and segment (cohort analysis) — the distribution is the insight.
  • Wrong-frequency expectations. Demanding social-app ratios from a quarterly-tax tool (or vice versa). Set targets from category behavior and your own cohorts’ trends.
  • Ignoring denominator games. Reclassifying dormant accounts out of MAU “cleans” the ratio cosmetically. Fix definitions once, keep them stable, and let trends speak.
  • Ratio without retention context. High DAU/MAU with collapsing absolute numbers is a shrinking cult, not health. Pair the ratio with cohort retention curves always.

Use it as: a habit gauge trended by cohort, judged against category frequency. See power users for who sits at the ratio’s top end and what they teach.