User stickiness often flies under the radar when it comes to picking metrics to measure. But while the classics of LTV, ROAS, installs, and impressions often take center stage, user stickiness is still an essential metric you should keep an eye on. With stickiness, your marketing and product teams have a simple way to track how well your users like your app and gain a good gauge of whether they will stick around or churn.
In this article, we'll cover user stickiness with a detailed look at its place among mobile marketing metrics, as well as best practices to consider to reduce user churn. Let's first establish what app user stickiness is and how to measure it.
What is User Stickiness?
User stickiness is a metric that keeps track of how often users come back to an app after installing it. You can calculate app stickiness by dividing the total daily active users (DAU) by the total monthly active users (MAU). You can then multiply the result by 100 to calculate stickiness as a percentage.
Say your app has 10,000 monthly active users, and 2,000 daily active users. Your stickiness would be .2 — or 20%.
App stickiness tells app development teams how many new users become long-term users. Furthermore, marketers use app stickiness to measure the frequency of (and depth of) app engagement to assess the likelihood of loyalty to the app by users over time.
How Does User Stickiness Differ From Retention Rates?
Though they seem similar, stickiness and retention have key differences. Retention is a much more definite metric, in some ways, as it tracks how often a user returns within a strict period (such as daily, or weekly) which you can measure on a continuum. Stickiness tracks one figure — your total number of daily users among your total monthly active users. Both can be expressed as a percentage.
Furthermore, marketers have different kinds of influence over retention versus stickiness. For example, retention is impacted by specific remarketing efforts, whether that's email or push campaigns.
If you're interested in learning more about retention rates, we've written up a short blog introducing the concept with GameAnalytics.
Three Best Practices to Improve Mobile App User Stickiness
Being sticky means understanding your users incredibly well. You need to know the answers to questions ranging from "What do they find valuable?" to "What do they really dislike?" Add to the former, and subtract from the latter. It's simple to say, but difficult in practice.
As with any other optimization, you'll need to test everything you try. But, for some ideas, here are three best practices to help make your app stick.
Make Onboarding Easy
If your app onboarding flow is difficult to navigate, users may be put off from becoming loyal users. However, an easy-to-navigate onboarding process could give the opposite result, delighting users who quickly return for more. As such, giving focus to every onboard and every app open — those first seconds could make a big difference to improving your app stickiness.
Interact with Your Users Meaningfully
Stickiness doesn’t end when your users close a session out. You need to think about all the touchpoints around your app that lead to an open and improve them too. For example, email might be your secret weapon that successfully intrigues users to open. Or a timely reminder via push might do just the trick. Ultimately, your goal is to remain top of mind to your users to help bring them back organically.
Set Reasonable Benchmarks
If you tie a goal to your stickiness, make sure it's reasonable. A high bar for app stickiness requires more parts than just marketing — you need alignment across teams, including product teams, who need to be bought into the need to improve stickiness. If you're aiming for better engagement, make sure you're all in on the idea before optimizing towards it.
A Sticky Solution
If you want to improve the stickiness of your app, consider Mintegral. We are a data-driven, programmatic, and interactive advertising platform dedicated to helping mobile apps bridge the gap among the world's most valuable markets, and making those apps appear to users who stick. Our services include user acquisition, monetization, and creative automation to help you find the installs that convert. Contact us today.
If you're searching for more mobile marketing guides, read up on our user acquisition and app monetization walkthroughs. Or, if you still don't know, discover how mobile marketing works! Finally, follow us on LinkedIn to receive the latest updates as they go live.
