Stickiness measures how habitual a product is, capturing whether customers return regularly rather than occasionally. The classic measure is the ratio of daily active users to monthly active users (DAU/MAU). A DAU/MAU of 0.5 means the average monthly user is in the product about half the days in a month, a sign of a deeply embedded daily-use product.
Reading the ratio
What counts as good stickiness depends on the product. A communication tool people live in might target a DAU/MAU above 0.5, while a tool used in a weekly or monthly workflow could be perfectly healthy in the 0.1 to 0.2 range. The signal is the trend within a product category: rising stickiness means the product is becoming more central to the customer routine, falling stickiness means the opposite.
- Stickiness is a specific, comparable facet of engagement and adoption.
- Higher stickiness raises switching costs and protects retention.
- A declining stickiness ratio is an early signal that a once-habitual account is drifting toward at-risk.
Multi-product relationships, the kind a cross-sell creates, tend to be the stickiest of all, because each additional product the customer depends on makes the whole relationship harder to unwind. Merrily tracks stickiness alongside the other usage signals that drive the account health score.