What is user stickiness?

Stickiness measures how often users are returning to an app. It’s an important metric for providing increased context for user engagement and app retention.

How to measure stickiness: Product stickiness is measured by dividing the number of daily active users by the number of monthly active users.

An app with sticky users typically has a strong retention rate and a lower churn rate. Although related, stickiness in business and retention are not the same thing. An app’s retention rate measures how many users are returning to the app month after month or year after year. Customer stickiness refers to how valuable a user perceives an app to be.

Stickiness in marketing is a customer’s organic interest in returning to your app while retention is more directly impacted by re-engagement efforts like push notifications, emails, and so on.

Across industries, a user stickiness ratio of 20% is widely accepted as healthy. Anything in the range of 25% or higher is very good. However, to get a more accurate picture, here are the global app stickiness benchmarks according to Adjust data on median stickiness ratios:

Above all else, to have sticky marketing campaigns you have to understand your users. In particular, your regular users and/or high-value users. What do they find valuable? What are their interests? What do they dislike? Fix anything that does not align with what your best users appreciate, and add features that complement the aspects they already treasure.

Then, you’ll need to take steps over time to make your app habit-forming. Essentially, this looks like gamifying non-gaming apps or adding meta layers to games. Introduce streaks for personal competition, friend challenges for social competition, valuable short-form tips and content, a deal of the day, or badges for your users to earn.

As with any other app optimization, you should test and learn from various methods to determine what, exactly, affects your app’s stickiness.

Our dashboard shows you your app’s daily and monthly active users, letting you calculate stickiness with ease. Plus, real-time data provides clear insights into the direct impact of your test and learn efforts.

Learn more about Datascape, which provides all of your data in one unified dashboard to deliver clear insights that facilitate quick decision-making.