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

The DAU/MAU ratio divides DAILY ACTIVE USERS by MONTHLY ACTIVE USERS to estimate stickiness: what fraction of the month the average monthly user actually shows up. A ratio of 0.32 reads as roughly ten active days per month; 0.5 — every-other-day usage — is elite consumer-social territory (Facebook's famous benchmark); 0.1 means about three days a month. It is the engagement world's favorite single number, and like every single number, it answers one question while pretending to answer several.

The arithmetic inherits everything from its parts: the same 'active' definition discipline (a value action, consistently applied to both numerator and denominator), the same bot-and-notification inflation risks, and a measurement convention worth pinning (average DAU over the month against that month's MAU). The interpretation discipline is cadence-relative: products have natural frequencies, and the ratio's fair value tracks them — messaging and social live near daily (0.4-0.6+), games and content run wide ranges, utilities and shopping sit naturally low, and a tax product near 0.08 in April may be perfectly healthy. Judging every product against social-app benchmarks manufactures false failure and — worse — engagement-bait roadmaps chasing daily visits from products whose value is weekly (the DAU entry's Goodhart warning, compounded by ratio form). The structural subtleties: the ratio is scale-sensitive during growth (a surge of new monthly users mechanically depresses it before retention has a chance to speak — read it beside COHORT retention curves, not instead of them), it says nothing about depth (ten shallow opens beat nine deep sessions in the ratio while losing in revenue), and its movements decompose like DAU's — acquisition, resurrection, churn — before they explain anything. Used honestly, it is a habit-strength tracker within one product over time and a rough comparator within one category.

DAU/MAU matters for habit-business models — social, messaging, games, content — where engagement frequency is the monetization engine, and for investors triaging consumer products at a glance. It matters as a misleading import everywhere else: weekly-cadence products (WAU/MAU serves them better) and value-per-session businesses get distorted by it. The discipline is cadence-honest benchmarks, definition stability, growth-phase adjustment, and the standing pairing with retention curves — stickiness is a symptom; cohort retention is the diagnosis.

The DAU/MAU ratio spread from the social-gaming and platform era — Facebook-age investor decks made it consumer tech's stickiness shorthand — and its over-application to products with non-daily rhythms became one of product analytics' standing cautionary tales.

Etymology: source.

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