A Quick Guide on Product Engagement Score (PES)

The Product Engagement Score (PES) tracks what users actually do across their lifecycle, including feature adoption, session frequency, and growth behaviors. This gives you a single metric that predicts retention better than NPS ever could.

In this guide, I’ll show you how to calculate PES, why it matters, how to improve your score, and how I use it in Userpilot to surface at-risk accounts before churn shows up in revenue.

What is the product engagement score (PES)?

The product engagement score (PES) is a composite metric that combines three distinct aspects of user behavior into a single number. It focuses entirely on in-product behavior, which makes it more reliable than survey-based metrics that depend on what users say instead of what they actually do.

It solves a common SaaS problem: fragmented metrics. Marketing focuses on acquisition. The product focuses on feature usage. Customer success focuses on retention. PES brings teams onto a shared view of engagement, which makes it easier to spot problems early, before they turn into churn or stalled expansion.

The score is the average of three pillars:

• Adoption: How users interact with your core features.
• Stickiness: How often users return to your product (typically measured by DAU/MAU or DAU/WAU ratios).
• Growth: Whether your user base is expanding faster than it’s shrinking (new + recovered users divided by churned users).

When you combine these, you get a score between 0 and 100. Each pillar is measured on the same scale, so no single metric dominates the result. A low score points to friction in the customer journey. A high score typically signals strong product engagement.

How do you calculate a product engagement score?

Calculating PES is simple from a math perspective, but defining the inputs requires clarity around what drives value in your product. The formula is the average of the three metrics:

PES = (Adoption Rate + Stickiness + Growth Rate) / 3

In the next sections, I’ll break down how to measure each component in practice.

1. How to measure product adoption?

Adoption is not about how many people visit your settings page. It measures how many users perform the actions that drive value. These actions are called “Core Events”. Choosing the wrong Core Events can skew the score, so they should reflect real workflows rather than generic actions like logging in.

In a project management tool, a Core Event might be “Task Created” or “Project Published.” In an invoicing app, a common Core Event is “Invoice Sent.”

To calculate the adoption rate for PES, use this formula:

Adoption = (Average number of Core Events adopted by active users ÷ Total number of Core Events available) × 100

For example, if your product has 10 core features and the average active user engages with four of them, your adoption score is 40. This metric is brutal but necessary because it highlights feature bloat. In most products, a small set of features accounts for the majority of meaningful usage. When teams ship features that go unused, the adoption score drops. This forces a shift from shipping code to driving feature adoption.

2. How to measure product stickiness?

Stickiness measures how regularly users return to your product. It answers a simple question: how many users come back on a consistent basis?

In SaaS, stickiness is commonly measured using ratios like DAU/MAU or WAU/MAU, which compare active usage across time periods. This ratio only makes sense when daily usage is a realistic expectation. For products like tax software, daily engagement is not a useful benchmark.

For most B2B SaaS tools, a common starting point is:

Stickiness = (DAU ÷ MAU) × 100

For products designed around weekly usage, such as analytics or reporting tools:

Stickiness = (WAU ÷ MAU) × 100

If you have 1,000 monthly active users and 300 of them return daily, your stickiness score is 30. Improving this score requires identifying what brings users back and reinforcing those behaviors inside the product.

3. How to measure product growth rate?

The growth component of PES focuses on the net health of your user base, not raw signups. Rapid acquisition can mask retention problems when growth is evaluated on its own. The quick ratio helps surface this balance.

The quick ratio measures how efficiently your user base grows relative to how quickly users leave.

Growth = (New accounts + Recovered accounts) / Dropped accounts

To fit this metric into the 0–100 PES scale, teams usually normalize the result. A quick ratio above 1 indicates expansion, while a value below 1 points to contraction. Some teams map this ratio to an internal scoring range, while others use net revenue retention (NRR) when they want the growth component to reflect revenue impact.

Strong growth means new and recovered users outpace dropped accounts by a clear margin. When this part of the score is low, the issue is retention, not acquisition.

Why product engagement score matters

If you already track NPS and churn, it’s fair to ask why you need another metric. NPS captures sentiment, not behavior, and churn is a lagging indicator; by the time it moves, it’s often too late to act.

PES fills this gap by acting as a leading indicator of product health, surfacing behavioral changes early and revealing why engagement is shifting, even when top-line metrics look fine. Specifically, PES helps you:

• Diagnose engagement issues by pinpointing whether problems stem from low adoption (onboarding or discovery gaps), low stickiness (insufficient usage frequency or workflow integration), or low growth (retention or expansion being offset by churn).
• Identify expansion opportunities by highlighting high-PES segments that consistently use core features and show strong retention signals, allowing you to focus upgrade efforts where they’re most likely to succeed.
• Validate product changes by comparing PES before and after releases to objectively assess whether a feature increases engagement or introduces friction.

How to improve your product engagement score

Calculating the score is straightforward. Improving it takes focused work across adoption, stickiness, and growth. PES does not move on its own. It improves when onboarding, messaging, and retention efforts are tied directly to real user behavior.

1. Fix adoption with better onboarding

Low adoption often means users are not aware of key features or do not understand how to use them. Documentation alone is rarely enough to close that gap.

I rely on contextual onboarding to address this. Rather than showing a generic product tour, I trigger walkthroughs during the onboarding process based on what the user is doing inside the product.

For example, when a user opens the Reports tab for the first time, I trigger a tooltip that explains how to generate a report. If a new user completes signup but does not invite a teammate, a slideout can prompt the next step with a personalized message.

Secondary onboarding also plays an important role in driving adoption. Primary onboarding focuses on reaching the first activation moment. Secondary onboarding introduces advanced features weeks or months later, when users are more likely to adopt them. This staged approach prevents overwhelming new users while ensuring the average number of core events adopted increases over time.

2. Drive stickiness with habit loops

When users do not return consistently, the product has not yet become part of the user’s workflow. Improving stickiness requires creating triggers that encourage repeat usage.

External triggers, such as emails, can prompt return visits. Internal triggers inside the product tend to be more effective for building habits. I often use lightweight gamification elements like progress bars, checklists, and streak counters to encourage frequent usage.

3. Boost growth by plugging the leaks

Improving the growth component of PES starts with customer retention. Reducing churn has a direct impact on the quick ratio and often outweighs new acquisition in the short term.

The first step is identifying at-risk customers. I segment users whose engagement metrics have declined over time. For example, users who haven’t logged in for two weeks or stopped using core features. Reaching out before cancellation helps surface pain points while there is still time to respond.

When a user initiates cancellation, a churn survey can help clarify intent, asking what went wrong and whether specific changes would make them reconsider. Options like pause plans or temporary discounts can reduce avoidable churn. Retaining even a small portion of these users can meaningfully improve the growth score.

Growth efforts should also focus on product-qualified leads (PQLs). These are free users who already show strong engagement signals. Converting them to paid plans increases new revenue without raising customer acquisition costs.

Measure what matters, then act

If you want to measure product engagement and act on the insights, Userpilot tracks all three PES components in real time. When you identify low adoption in a specific segment, you can launch a targeted flow to guide those users toward core features. When stickiness drops, you can deploy checklists or tooltips to re-engage users before they churn.

Book a demo to see how Userpilot helps you track engagement metrics and turn them into action.