What is the DAU/MAU ratio?
DAU/MAU is daily actives divided by monthly actives, the standard stickiness metric. The formula, what it means in days per month, and when not to use it.
What is the DAU/MAU ratio?
DAU/MAU is daily active users divided by monthly active users, expressed as a percentage. It measures stickiness: how much of your monthly audience shows up on a typical day. A ratio of 20% means the average monthly user opens the product about six days a month.
The formula.
DAU/MAU = (average daily active users / monthly active users) x 100
- DAU
- Unique users who performed a meaningful action on a given day, averaged across the month.
- MAU
- Unique users who performed that action at least once in the trailing 30 days.
The ratio has a direct reading: multiply by 30 and you get the average number of active days per month per user. 20% is roughly 6 days.
A worked example.
A team collaboration tool in October.
| Monthly active users | 42,000 |
|---|---|
| Average daily active users | 9,660 |
| Calculation | 9,660 / 42,000 |
DAU/MAU = 23%, or about 7 active days per user per month
Seven days a month for a workplace tool means people use it on most working days of one week and not the others. For a product positioned as a daily workflow, that is a habit problem, not a growth problem.
What the ratio actually tells you
DAU and MAU on their own are vanity-adjacent: both go up when marketing spends more. The ratio between them cannot be bought, because acquisition raises the numerator and the denominator together. It only moves when behaviour changes.
The interpretation is unusually concrete. A DAU/MAU of 50% means the average monthly user is active on fifteen days out of thirty. At 10% they show up three times a month, which for most products means they are not really users, they are occasional visitors who have not yet churned.
That makes it the fastest read on whether a product has become a habit. Retention tells you people came back at some point. Stickiness tells you how often.
What ratios look like in practice
The right target depends entirely on the natural usage frequency of the category. A tax product is not failing because nobody opens it in June.
| Product type | Typical DAU/MAU | Reads as |
|---|---|---|
| Messaging and social | 40% to 60% | 12 to 18 days a month |
| Daily workflow tools | 25% to 40% | 8 to 12 days a month |
| Team collaboration | 15% to 30% | 5 to 9 days a month |
| Analytics and reporting | 10% to 20% | 3 to 6 days a month |
| Invoicing, tax, HR admin | Under 10% | Correctly used a few times a month |
Directional patterns from published industry reporting, not measured Mrkr data. Below roughly 10%, use WAU/MAU instead: the daily ratio stops discriminating.
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How the ratio gets gamed, and how it breaks
A loose definition of active
Counting an app open, or a background sync, or an email click inflates DAU without anyone doing anything. Define active as the action that delivers the value.
Notification-driven spikes
Push notifications raise DAU without raising value. If the ratio climbs while retention is flat, you are buying visits, not building a habit.
The wrong cadence
For products used weekly or monthly by design, WAU/MAU or MAU/QAU is the honest version. Forcing a daily ratio onto a weekly product produces a permanently bad-looking number.
Averaging across very different segments
A power-user segment at 60% and a dormant majority at 4% average out to something that describes neither. Segment before you conclude.
Measuring it with Mrkr
Both halves of the ratio require counting unique people across days, which cookieless mode cannot do by design: its identifier is rotated daily so it cannot link anyone to yesterday. For DAU/MAU you either enable Mrkr's optional per-site cookie mode, which needs consent, or you attach your own user id to events once someone is signed in.
For a logged-in product the second route is usually the better one anyway: your backend already knows who did what, and the id is stable, correct, and not dependent on the browser.
Once identity is in place, DAU and MAU are event counts over rolling windows, and the ratio is a division you can put on a dashboard next to retention.
Questions, answered.
Related terms.
- What is retention rate?
Retention rate is the share of users from a starting group who are still active at the end of a defined period.
- What is churn rate?
Churn rate is the share of customers, users or revenue lost during a period.
- What is north star metric?
A north star metric is the single number a company chooses to represent the core value its product delivers to customers.
- What is unique visitor?
A unique visitor is one person counted once within a reporting period, no matter how many times they visit or how many pages they view.
- What is product analytics?
Product analytics is the measurement of what people do inside a product rather than how they arrived at it.
Where this shows up in Mrkr
- Track active users by cohort in Mrkr retention analysis
The cohort view that separates an engagement decline from growth dilution.
- Browse the full analytics glossary
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