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newsletter issue #06, by Selman

Product Stickiness - how to use the metric that Facebook used to predict retention 🕸️

Some products are meant to be rarely used.

If you're using an app to pay bills, you're only going to use it just once a month or you're only going to use Uber if you need to get somewhere.

And that's okay for these kinds of apps since people have to use them regularly.

But most apps aren't made for essential needs; they need their users to use their product more and more to profit more. 💰

That's what Facebook needed, and they've found a very solid way to predict the success of their products.

Read on to find out more about what product stickiness is and how you can improve it:

Est. Read Time: 4 minutes, 37 seconds

This Week's Highlights

Fresh content you'll like:

Measuring and Driving Product Stickiness – the advanced guide 📘

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Join our next group demo on October 13. 👈

Prime Years of Facebook

If you have used Facebook during its prime years, you know how fun some of the games you could (and still can) play on the platform were.

I've had a couple of games I played almost every day myself; you could say that that feature of the platform sticked with me.

With numerous games from different genres, the situation was similar with millions of people, which definitely helped Facebook grow a previously unachieved user base.

During these times, Facebook used an original metric to measure the success of individual game titles on their platform: product stickiness.

What Is Product Stickiness?

Product stickiness is the ratio of daily active users (DAU) to monthly active users (MAU) at a specific period.

So it's basically the percentage of your users who log in to your product daily to the number of users who log in to your product at least once a month.

If you have a total of 500 monthly active users with 50 users that sign in to your product every day, your product stickiness rate is 10%, which is not perfect but not bad either.

💡 There are some products who replace DAU with weekly active users (WAU) in the product stickiness formula, just because it better suits their business model.

It's definitely not easy to create a product that a significant amount of users actively use every single day, but it is highly related to the overall success of the product.

Facebook's research into a number of games on their platform seems to prove that; the lower the stickiness of a game gets, the less successful they are overall in terms of user base and revenue generated.

Best Way to Improve Stickiness: offer real and constant value 💎

If the evidence is out there and improving stickiness can really make your product more successful and grow effortlessly, you should just do it, right?

It's not as easy as it sounds. 😥

In Facebook's case, the products were games that were mostly simple like Candy Crush or Farmville. The more you played, the more you released dopamine, the feel-good hormone.

You can use a similar strategy for even a B2B product by gamifying it to make it more fun, but it's not going to cut it alone.

What you notice when you take a closer look into apps and products that we use daily that aren't games, you can see a pattern that's more difficult to achieve for product owners.

It's constant and personalized value.

Your product has to offer new value for users that log in every day/week.

For example, I use this cognitive training app called Lumosity every day, and even though the app has a ton of small games in it, I'm mostly in there for the value.

With its small games that focus on improving your memory and attention, it helps you get better at different cognitive tasks. Here are the two features of the app I use regularly, the home screen and the progress report: 👇🏻

The promise of the app itself is a reason alone for me to use it daily, I know, but these specific features that highlight the promise are the actual reason behind the product's success.

You have different game modes that I usually choose based on the time I have or the mood I'm in, which makes it more convenient to use in a lot of situations.

And you have the progress report that shows you what kind of games and areas you're progressing in.

So, to sum up:

➡ There is no friction to value, you have different paths to value based on your preferences at the time.

➡ You can follow and see your progress, which motivates you to use it more as the app proves that you're getting better at these cognitive tasks.

2 more examples

Another B2C example would be language-learning apps like Duolingo which ensures that you can learn a new language, from your phone, by investing 5 minutes a day. Since learning a new language is a very linear path that's milestone after milestone, if the app can help you succeed, you'll invest more time each day.

For B2B SaaS, SEO research tools can be a great example. Most marketing people initially sign up for tools like Semrush or Ahrefs to do research, spy on competitors, create content briefs, etc..

But, with features that offer constant value such as tracking your own website's performance in-depth and daily/weekly/monthly email notifications that notify you about changes and improvements, they can draw users in daily.

**

An active user base that regularly finds more and more value in your product can help you acquire users more easily, retain existing users efficiently, and grow through upsells/expansions and virality.

Calculating product stickiness and taking actions that will improve this metric is the first step down this road.

Here's our in-depth guide on product stickiness that will help you get started: 👇🏻

Measuring and Driving Product Stickiness – the advanced guide 📕

Hope this helps.

Selman

Growth at UserGuiding

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