$ per DAU

Lets face it, revenue per thousand impressions is a number that could swing up and down depending on lots of factors. But I think a lot of us would agree that revenue per Daily Active User (DAU) would be a better indicator.

I have an app that logs 500 DAU, it has no ads yet. I want to see if its worth my time adding ads into it…
What would you estimate I receive from interstitals and 320x50 banners per 100 DAU?

From what i’ve read, perhaps about $1 per 100 DAU?

46 Cents in Revenue Per Daily Active User? Vancouver’s A Thinking Ape Has Seen It Before - Inside Mobile Apps

ofcourse, engaging games with monster IAP models might have 46 cents per DAU which is about $46 per 100 DAU?

found another interesting read

ARPDAU - Games Brief

Still, dont know how android non-games would perform… any suggestions or estimates?

depends of many parameters of course but the formula is

DAU * avg imps of a user * ecpm = Revenue

i.e.:
500 DAU * 5 imps * $2 = $5 revenue = $1 per 100

Reaching this num ($0.01 per DAU) is great and with the right user engagement, you can build a significant revenue model out of the apps.
Obviously it won’t be interesting if your DAU is low… make sure to build up the UX so the user will want to come back.

i dont have google analytic or something like that in my app to know how many active daily users i get (if that what you mean by dau)
my app have:
10256 total users
4177 active users
average of 300 new daily active users
app old: 3 weeks
revenue each day is about 60$

I have an app with over 6k DAU and it makes below $0,002 per DAU with banners and interstitials. Since it uses icon ads and most users accept them (arround 85%), it compensates for the low $ per DAU.

Of course icons will go away soon and I’m trying to improve it. One of the reasons is the 0,4% Admob CTR yielding a very low CPM. Other problem are the interstitials and app-walls mostly advertising games, in a non-game app.

Any tips to improve this low value?

Yes that is what I mean. I use Flurry to track app usage, its real easy to integrate.

I think $60/day is great for the amount of installs you have. I wish we could really pinpoint how many DAU you have… Which network are you using and is this with icon/push ads or intersitital/banners?

sounds like a bad situation going on there. $0.002 ARPDAU is super low, what category is your app in? have you tried maybe setting some sort of keywords or filters (depending on the ad network of course)

thats a crazy number. what about your numbers? whats your ARPDAU?

I don’t do DAU analytics so I can’t really tell.

I get very similar $0.003 per DAU - as well (using banner ads and interstitial/appwalls). Mostly admob banner ads and Leadbolt HTML AppWall.

Quote:

i dont have google analytic or something like that in my app to know how many active daily users i get (if that what you mean by dau)
my app have:
10256 total users
4177 active users
average of 300 new daily active users
app old: 3 weeks
revenue each day is about 60$

This is really amazing ARPDAU - do you think it is because of the game/app format i.e. each user very engaged and stays till they have exhausted the players etc. - or a need exists among users to really identify footballers - so the high engagement. With perhaps users only using the app once even - but use it for a very long first session etc. ?

toxic,

I would not take the Flurry figures at face value - as from what I have seen (and I may not have examined it in detail) - but the numbers Flurry gives are done using their own conception of what an active user is etc. (i.e. if user has used app within few days or something) - i.e. I had the sense that their metrics were using a different conception of some of the things than may be the case with others.

For example AppBrain - for some reason I find AppBrain’s stats reasonable (though perhaps there maybe some issue there as well). AppBrain also gives good breakdown of stats by language, by device etc. - this is info that Google Developer Console does not give (though Google Analytics should give better info on this - not released an app with Google Analytics included yet - though may do later).

Good thing about AppBrain - they also have hourly stats where you can see the ebb and flow of users (related to U.S. time cycle).

Also with Google Analytics - I haven’t released it in an app yet, but in testing, I could see that (with just one tester) I was getting all sorts of inflated numbers about the “number of users” etc. - number of sessions etc. one can see might be accurate, but their “number of users” maybe misleading (or maybe their terminology is misleading i.e. should be called number of sessions etc. ?).

Quote:
I don’t do DAU analytics so I can’t really tell.

Just divide revenue per day by the daily active users reported by AppBrain.

Are you basically saying Flurry shows lower numbers?

According to Flurry
Active User - “An active user is defined as a user that has had a session with your application on a specified day.” - Sounds like unique visit.
Session - “A session is one use of the application by an end user. This typically begins when the application is launched and ends when the application is terminated.”

I am happy with the numbers I am receiving, I think they are pretty accurate…

I thought some advertisers pay less if the user has clicked the ad previously. So DAU would depend on the ad provider, ad type and if its a new user. For that reason i don’t even try and figure DAU out currently.

This is the only reason i think this happens:
I have an app that does massive revenue swing one specific day out of the week. There is a good reason for this as its an app themed about a day of the week so its completely normal for it to happen. The great thing is it shows me a pretty cool set of data to dig through. I don’t have any other app that does this.

Regular downloads per day of this app ~ 250 to 350
the specific day its themed about ~ 1700 to 2500

Anyway it has nearly 6x number of impressions and 4.5 x clicks on its “special day”. Now i think this is due to the first time users jumping so high on that day because it makes about 12x more in revenue than a regular day. The click rate and impressions doesn’t seem to correlate that well with its actual revenue. I may be wrong but its been doing this for a solid couple months. I also only dug through the data for a few hours when i noticed how odd it was compared to my other apps. I have had odd data lead me down the wrong path before so it could be horribly bad data.

One last thing: it also has a very weird other bit of data. It has only an 11% uninstall rate. People don’t seem to always keep using it, but it seems like they just forget about it and leave it installed. Not sure if its the size being about 3.5mb. Just weird…

That was my impression of Flurry - I think it maybe because I did not fully use it (or found it to be cumbersome) - compared to the AppBrain stats which are easy and “right there” with their graphs etc.

What I found interesting from Flurry was the stats about number of users shared with another of my apps (don’t know if it’s possible to get vs. some other random app) - and for event tracking to see where users flow through app.

Anyway, just checking Flurry again, I am seeing a consistent 1.2x to 1.3x HIGHER number for DAU on AppBrain vs. Flurry - so AppBrain is higher. This is not due to the “what time does their day start” type of issue (if the ratio is consistent day after day).

So there is some discrepancy - whether this indicates Flurry is wrong or AppBrain is not clear to me.

In general though, I find the Flurry stats a bit confusing - and perhaps their figures would make more sense if they could somehow scale them across time period choices - for example the pie chart for session frequency has different slabs depending on the time chosen - so basically you have to scale in your own mind. They should have done some scaling or some such thing to make sure developers can make sense of some of the stats in a time-period insensitive manner etc. (this is just one criticism).

This however does not indicate whether Flurry is “wrong” - that they have FEWER DAU may suggest maybe they are doing a better job or something ? Not sure.

It’s in the Tools category. I will try to use Admob filters without compromising the fill rate too much and see what happens.

i use air push banners and mobile core offerwall, i launched an update today to include app flood and app next in my app too because my game time is long with a lot of breaks and i dont want to show the same ads to users (showing the same ad will decrease CTR)

yes because its a game, my other apps dont have anything close to this, its a very engaging game (for huge football fans), before launching it i show some pics to a friend to know if the pic is easy or hard, he liked it and he kept asking me for more pics everyday.
i think they use it more than one time (if they like it) because its a really long game to finish in only one session