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Stickiness

Last updated: Oct 07, 2022

On this page

  • What questions can Stickiness answer?
  • Getting started
  • Using Stickiness
  • Viewing individual users
  • Stickiness vs. Retention

Stickiness is a type of Insight that allows you to see how many times users perform a specific event in a period of time.

These analyses are useful in tracking if an event is particularly engaging for users. For example, while you may track Weekly Active Users (WAU) using our Trend insight, stickiness would allow you to distill the WAUs who are highly engaged within that week.

What questions can Stickiness answer?

  • How deeply are users engaging with my product?
  • Who are my most highly-engaged users?
  • Are users engaging more with my product now than they did a month ago?

Getting started

To create a Stickiness insight, navigate to the Insights tab on the side menu of your dashboard and click the 'New insight' button. Next, open the dropdown labeled 'Type' and change it from 'Trends' to 'Stickiness'.

Using Stickiness

Select the event you want to see the stickiness for in the drop down menu on the Stickiness tab under "Steps".

The y-axis on the graph will correspond to the number of unique users or groups. The x-axis corresponds to the number of times the user or group has performed the event in the specified time period. As an example, let's say you have your date range set at 7 days, and the data point at 3 days has a value of 1,740. This means that 1,740 unique people performed this event on 3 out of the last 7 days.

It's also worth noting that Stickiness measures the exact number of times a user performed an action. For example, if a user performed an event in 4 out of the last 5 weeks, they would only be included in this group, and not the group who performed the action in 3 out of 5 weeks.

Now that you have the hang of Stickiness, you can tune your insight further by:

  • Adding more events that you want to compare the Stickiness of
  • Changing the time range or interval
  • Filtering events based on properties

Viewing individual users

You can drill down into specific users who have performed an event or action multiple times:

  1. Hover a particular data point on your stickiness graph
  2. Click on the datapoint to bring up a list of users related to that data point
  3. You can create a cohort of those users directly from the modal that appears

This is useful when you're looking to create cohorts of highly-engaged users who frequently use a certain feature or view a certain page.

Stickiness vs. Retention

At the surface, both Stickiness and Retention can look very similar, and while they are closely related it's important to understand the differences between them.

  • Retention - Measures the percent of users who came back and performed an event within a given period at least once
  • Stickiness - Measures how many times within a period a user performed an event

Both Stickiness and Retention are important when analyzing how engaged users are with your product. In general, retention is good at measuring how well you're doing at keeping users engaged overall, whereas Stickiness measures how deeply users are engaging with your product.

Questions?

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Trends

Overview Trends are a type of Insight that allow you to plot data from people, events, and properties. Trends are an incredibly powerful part of PostHog's analytics toolbox, and are useful for finding patterns in your data, as well as monitoring your product to ensure everything is running smoothly. What can you learn from trends? Track how your metrics are changing over time. Compare the usage of different features side-by-side. Determine how a specific change affects usage or engagement with…

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Author

  • Paul Hultgren
    Paul Hultgren

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