What Is a Good Product Stickiness Ratio & How to Improve It?

In the world of SaaS, there's a metric that's often overlooked, but absolutely critical to long-term success: product stickiness. It's not as talked about as acquisition or conversion rates, but in many ways it's even more important. Because stickiness measures how engaged and loyal your existing users are—and that has a huge impact on everything from revenue retention to word-of-mouth growth.

In this post, we'll break down what exactly product stickiness means, how to measure it, what a good benchmark is, and proven ways to make your product more sticky. Let's dive in.

Defining Product Stickiness

At its core, product stickiness refers to how addicted your users are to your product. Are they regularly engaging with key features? Do they consider it an essential part of their workflow or daily life? Would they be disappointed or frustrated if they could no longer use it?

In more concrete terms, stickiness measures two key things:

1. How frequently are users returning to your product?

2. How much value are they getting from each session?

The goal is to have users coming back often and accomplishing meaningful things each time. That's the sign of a must-have product experience.

So why does product stickiness matter so much? There are a few big reasons:

1. Retention & Revenue

Sticky products keep users around longer. And the longer users stay, the more revenue you'll generate from them over time. Think about it—if your average customer lifetime is 6 months, then acquiring a new customer only generates 6 months of revenue. But if you can extend that average lifetime to 1 year, 2 years, 5 years through stickiness, the ROI of acquisition increases exponentially.

To put some numbers behind it, research from Bain & Company found that increasing customer retention by just 5% can increase profits by 25% to 95%. Stickiness is key to maximizing lifetime value and improving overall business economics.

2. Expansion Revenue

Highly engaged users don't just stick around longer, they're also more likely to expand their usage and spend more over time. If users are getting tons of value from your core product, they're much more likely to adopt new features, upgrade to higher tier plans, and purchase add-ons or cross-sells. Stickiness paves the way for account expansion and negative revenue churn.

3. Virality & Word of Mouth

When users are really engaged with a product, they tend to become advocates and evangelize it to others. They write glowing reviews, post about it on social media, and recommend it to friends and colleagues. This word-of-mouth promotion is one of the most powerful growth engines for SaaS businesses. A study by the Wharton School of Business found that referred customers have a 16% higher lifetime value than non-referred customers. Stickiness fuels those referrals.

4. Competitive Advantage

In crowded SaaS markets, stickiness can be a huge competitive differentiator. Even if competitors can copy your features, they can't copy the user habits and loyalty you've built up. When your product becomes an indispensable part of users' lives or businesses, switching to a rival solution becomes much harder. As investor Andrew Chen puts it, "the easiest way to build a monopoly is to build a product that is so good, people voluntarily use it more and more over time." That's the power of stickiness.

Measuring Product Stickiness

Now that we understand the importance of stickiness, how do you actually measure it? The most common metric is the stickiness ratio, sometimes called the DAU/MAU ratio.

Here's how to calculate it:

Stickiness Ratio = Daily Active Users (DAU) / Monthly Active Users (MAU)

Where:

• Daily Active Users = number of unique users who interact with your product on a given day

• Monthly Active Users = number of unique users who interact with your product in a given month

  
  

Essentially, it measures the percentage of your total user base that is coming back to your product on a daily basis. The higher the percentage, the stickier your product is.

For example, let's say your SaaS product has 10,000 monthly active users and 2,500 daily active users. Your stickiness ratio would be:

2,500 / 10,000 = 25%

So 25% of your monthly users are using your product every single day. That's pretty sticky!

Some important nuances to keep in mind with the stickiness ratio:

Define an "active" user: You need to set clear criteria for what counts as an "active" user for your product. Is it simply logging in? Engaging with certain features? Creating or completing some type of content? Choose a definition that indicates true engagement and product value for your particular solution.

Compare to usage interval: The stickiness ratio works best for products designed for daily usage, like social media apps, business tools, mobile games, etc. If your product is built for weekly or monthly usage (eg. an employee performance management tool), you would want to calculate weekly or monthly stickiness instead—WAU/MAU or MAU/YAU. Pick the timeframe that matches your ideal usage pattern.

Watch for seasonal trends: Be aware of seasonal fluctuations in usage, especially around holidays, summer months, fiscal year-ends, etc. You may see temporary dips or spikes in stickiness that don't necessarily reflect the underlying health of your product. Pay more attention to long-term trends than short-term blips.

Segment your user base: Slice and dice your stickiness ratio by different user attributes and cohorts, such as plan type, industry, user role, acquisition channel, or cohort start date. You may uncover important insights—for instance, maybe enterprise customers are much stickier than SMBs, or maybe retention is higher for users acquired through paid search vs. social media. Segmentation helps you get more targeted in your retention efforts.

Pair with other metrics: The stickiness ratio is a great high-level thermometer, but it becomes more actionable when analyzed alongside other engagement metrics like session duration, frequency of key events, retention by stage, etc. Stickiness tells you how often people are coming back, but not necessarily how much they're accomplishing in each session.

What Is a Good Stickiness Ratio?

Like most SaaS metrics, what counts as a "good" stickiness ratio depends a lot on your product category, business model, usage norms, and target customers. A 10% ratio might be great for a monthly reporting tool, but terrible for a daily task management app.

That said, here are some general benchmarks for daily stickiness across different categories:

• Social media apps: 25-50%

• Mobile games: 20-30%

• B2B SaaS tools: 10-30%

• E-commerce: 10-20%

• Media/content: 5-10%

  
  

For a deeper breakdown, here are some real-world stickiness ratios from well-known companies:

• Facebook: 66% stickiness ratio

• Twitter: 36%

• Slack: 20%

• Asana: 10%

• HubSpot: 5%

  
  

The important thing is to benchmark against similar products in your space, and focus on continuously improving your own ratio over time. Even moving the needle by a few percentage points can have a huge impact on revenue and retention.

How to Make Your Product Stickier

Improving stickiness is both an art and a science—you need to deeply understand the needs, behaviors and motivations of your users, and then continuously experiment with new ways to make your product a more valuable and seamless part of their lives.

Here are some proven tactics to try:

1. Nail the onboarding experience

Stickiness starts from day one. You need to get users hooked during that critical first impression with your product. Invest heavily in frictionless, delightful onboarding flows that get users to experience meaningful value quickly. Use interactive product tours, checklists, templates, and human-in-the-loop strategies to reduce time-to-value. The quicker users see the benefit, the more likely they are to build a lasting habit.

2. Focus on your power features

Double down on the features that make your product unique and valuable. What are the key actions that separate casual visitors from your most engaged champions? Dig into your product analytics to identify usage patterns of your power users and highest lifetime value customers. Then do everything you can to drive more users towards those sticky behaviors through targeted in-app guides, emails, or feature design.

3. Personalize the experience

The more you can tailor your product to each user's unique needs and preferences, the more indispensable it will become in their lives. Leverage user data to create dynamic experiences—curate relevant content, offer personalized recommendations, customize views based on past behavior. You can even consider adaptive onboarding flows or tiered feature-sets based on user personas. The more personal your product feels, the harder it is to leave.

4. Build habit-forming loops

The most addictive products are engineered around repeating cycles that keep users coming back for more. Think about how you can create habit-forming loops within your product using hooks like push notifications, email digests, task completions, or social validation. Make your product the go-to solution for accomplishing a specific job-to-be-done on a recurring basis. Experiment with gamification elements like points, streaks, or levels to further reinforce those sticky usage patterns.

5. Invest in customer success

Don't just leave it up to your product to drive stickiness. Proactively engage with customers outside your product to increase their success and satisfaction. Have customer success managers regularly check in to provide guidance, feedback, and best practices. Host user workshops or webinars to share tips and build community. Solicit advice from your power users to make them feel invested. Offer white-glove onboarding for high-value customers. A high-touch customer success approach can help turn casual users into loyal advocates.

6. Continuously gather feedback

Regularly collect qualitative and quantitative feedback from your users to understand what's working and not working in your quest for stickiness. Use in-app microsurveys, larger NPS surveys, user testing sessions, customer interviews, and product analytics to surface friction points or drop-off moments in the user experience. Then systematically address those issues in your roadmap. Never stop iterating and improving based on user insights.

Fiscal Flow and Financial Metrics

While product and customer facing teams are working hard to boost stickiness, it's also critical to have a strong handle on your underlying financial metrics. Because without a solid foundation of clean, accurate financial data, it's hard to track the ROI of all those stickiness initiatives.

That's why so many SaaS leaders rely on Fiscal Flow to help them:

• Implement proper revenue recognition and expense allocation based on subscription data

• Calculate core SaaS metrics like MRR, churn, lifetime value, and IRR

• Compare retention and expansion cohort performance

• Model the impact of stickiness improvements on their cash flow

• Prepare audit-proof books and projections for fundraising or exit diligence

  
  

In short, Fiscal Flow helps you gain a complete, trustworthy picture of your SaaS business, so you can make smarter decisions to improve the metrics that matter most—like stickiness. If you're ready to take your financial clarity to the next level, get in touch with our team of SaaS experts. We'd love to learn more about your growth goals.