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Badoo Product Manager on Calculating ‘Stickiness’

Toby Wilkins, Product Manager at Badoo, Bumble and Lumen, has shared his thoughts on the product metric ‘stickiness’ in a new blog post.

While internal figures for monthly users, retention and registration can be immensely valuable, Wilkins argues, looking at the ratios between such measures can provide additional insight.

Stickiness is calculated for a given app by dividing DAU by MAU to find the percentage of MAU active each day.

The results vary massively depending on the type of app being assessed – popular messenger apps such as WhatsApp can have stickiness of 80%+, while an app like TripAdvisor may only be used once per month.

Charting this DAU/MAU percentage against the monetary value of each individual session shows groups of apps – many with high usage / low value and many with low usage / high value.

If an app is low in usage and low in session value, it will be difficult to monetise effectively. Conversely, a high usage and high value app like Uber can approach unicorn status very quickly.

Dating apps have reasonably high DAU/MAU, and average session value. They are similar to entertainment and gaming apps in this regard.

One limitation of the DAU/MAU statistic, the piece notes, is that it fails to capture intense bursts of activity followed by long periods of downtime. This may be how many users interact with dating apps – experiencing waves of motivation and exasperation in their attempts to find a partner.

A second formula introduced by Wilkins is for finding “MoM retained MAU”. By taking the MAU from February and subtracting the number of new February registrations, it is possible to find the absolute number of returning users on an app. Dividing this number by the MAU for the previous month gives the percentage of users an app is retaining month-by-month.

Read more here.

Scott Harvey

Scott is the Editor of Global Dating Insights. Raised in Dorset, he holds a BA from The University of Nottingham and an MSc from Lund University School of Economics and Management. Previously he has written about politics, economics and technology for various online publications.

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