The Stickiness Metric widget measures app engagement by showing the average frequency of visitor or account activity. Stickiness looks at the average percentage of users who are high-frequency return users using Daily/Weekly/Monthly active user metrics. The Stickiness metric finds the ratio of average daily or weekly active users to average weekly or monthly active users in a time period.
Set business objectives against your app's stickiness and push teams to improve the stickiness percentage for an app or segment. Product teams can push features that deliver frequent value to users or fix bugs that frustrate users and push them away. Customer-facing teams can engage users and pull them into your app. Marketing campaigns, education programs, and sales incentives are great ways to move your stickiness score.
Stickiness is one of the three pillars of the Product Engagement Score alongside adoption and growth.
Requirements
- Every Pendo user can use this widget
Understanding the data
A Visitor or Account with any event recorded by Pendo during a day, week, or month is considered active.
Active user metrics measure unique users who used your product during a time period. A user who uses the product today is a daily active user and also a weekly active user. A user who used the product this week but not today is a weekly active user. In this example, if we look at DAU/WAU for today, it's 50%. There is one unique active user today and two unique active users this week. This calculation can be processed for every day and averaged to produce the average DAU/WAU for a larger time period. If users are engaging with a product and finding value, they will return frequently and the ratio of short-term active users to long-term active users shortens since weekly active users are frequently also daily active users producing a DAU/WAU closer to 100%. The time periods used are up to you based on how frequently you expect users to use your product.
MAU is calculated as Trailing 30 days, while WAU is calculated as Trailing 7 days (both including or excluding weekends per the setting in your Manage PES page, which will simply subtract the data from weekends from the calculation).
Hover over a point on the line to see the raw data and percentage for that date.
Ratios of Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Active Users or Accounts
The stickiness calculation can measure active visitors or active accounts to generate the stickiness percentage. The ratio you choose depends on your business, your customer base, and the expected habits of your users. Each combination will likely have a different percentage. It's important to pick the ratio that makes sense for your application.
Possible Combinations
Measuring by active users is used when each individual user's activity is important to the success of the business. Your app could be targeted to single users with personal subscriptions or to businesses using a per-seat pricing model where each user should be finding value to justify the cost. Maybe cost isn't a concern and you just want your app to be a valuable tool that all users return to frequently. In any of these scenarios, measuring stickiness by user could be the right choice.
- Daily Active Users/Weekly Active Users - Active user base. When users use the app they use it frequently but maybe not habitually. Typically produces a moderate stickiness percentage as unique daily visitors are compared with a smaller sample of unique weekly visitors.
- Daily Active Users/Monthly Active Users - Highly active users. Users are expected to use the app habitually every day. Typically produces a lower stickiness percentage as unique daily visitors are compared with all unique visitors for the month.
- Weekly Active Users/Monthly Active Users - Involved user base, when users use the app they do infrequent tasks or maintenance but aren't expected to use it daily. Typically produces a high stickiness percentage due to the relatively small number of weeks in a month and the longer time window available for a user to qualify as a WAU.
Measuring by active accounts is used when individual users aren't expected to return to the app frequently but someone in the account should. This may be expected for system monitoring tools, financial apps, or platforms that use automatic alerts to prompt user activity. Users don't have daily tasks in the app but return regularly for maintenance, completing workflows on a schedule, or responding to issues.
- Daily Active Accounts/Weekly Active Accounts - Active customers. The app is part of a frequent workflow, likely belonging to a designated team, that's performed more than once a week. Typically produces a moderate Stickiness percentage as unique daily accounts are compared with a smaller sample of unique weekly accounts.
- Daily Active Accounts/Monthly Active Accounts - Highly active customers. The app is used daily by someone at the account, maybe to complete an important daily workflow or access information. Typically produces a lower stickiness percentage as unique daily accounts are compared with all unique accounts for the month.
- Weekly Active Accounts/Monthly Active Accounts - Habitual customers. Someone at the account is expected to access your app on a weekly basis, possibly to complete a transaction or run a report. Typically produces a high stickiness score due to the relatively small number of weeks in a month and the longer time window available for an account to qualify as a weekly active account.
Hide Weekends
Hiding weekends removes the data collected on weekends from the overall average calculation and removes weekend dates from the chart. Business apps with most usage between Monday and Friday will likely see improved metrics after removing days with no expected usage from calculations. This generally improves stickiness for Daily Active ratios as weekend days with no daily usage are removed and no longer pull down average usage on week days. Weekly Active vs Monthly Active percentages may decrease slightly as users who only use the app on weekends are removed.
Add the widget to the dashboard
1. Select + Add Widget in the top right corner of the Dashboard.
2. Select the Stickiness Metric widget from the list of available widgets.
3. Edit the widget to select the name, metric, date range, weekend data, segment, and app settings.
- Name - Display name on the Dashboard
- Metric - Ratios for comparing Daily/Weekly/Monthly Active Visitors or Accounts
- Date Range - Date range for the data used by the widget
- Hide Weekends - Hides weekend data (Saturday and Sunday) in the widget
- Segment - Segment for Visitor or Account data used by the widget
- App - If you have multiple apps, choose which app the widget should use
Edit or remove the widget
The widget can be edited or removed from the Dashboard.
- Select More on the top right corner of the widget.
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- Edit Widget opens the Edit Widget module where you can change all the widget parameters.
- Remove Widget permanently removes the widget from the dashboard.