Using ARPU and ARPPU in Mobile App ROI and Media Allocation Analysis

Source: Apsalar

Mobile app developers can get stronger return on investment (ROI) from their mobile apps by leveraging the data in their attribution platform. Attribution measurements such as average revenue per user (ARPU) and average revenue per paying user (ARPPU) can be analyze in order to make better decisions on mobile advertising campaigns. In order to help you better understand, we've asked our partner Apsalar to share insights about how mobile marketers can leverage these measurements for investment and media decisions. 

ARPU Measurement Defined

ARPU is one of the most useful measures in mobile analytics. It refers to the average revenue per user, meaning that it measures the total revenue driven by an app divided by the number of installs. You can use Apsalar to calculate this for all app installs, paid app installs, organic app installs or total/paid/organic installs for a particular time period. With Apsalar you can further parse your data to measure ARPU by country, vendor and campaign.

ARPPU Measurement Defined

ARPPU is a measure originally designed for subscription-based businesses, like a game that you pay a fee to use every month. The idea was to be able to examine the quality of paying users by eliminating the free or non-revenue users from the math. This measure is particularly valuable for “freemium model” businesses where a small number of people are driving the lion’s share of app revenue.

ARPU Measurement and Install Campaign Vendor Allocation Decisions

ARPU is a powerful metric for both overall and comparative business analysis. Examining your ARPU across all of your installs, or broad classes of installs like organic versus paid, helps you understand both overall business viability and the quality of your app experience. If, for example, you expected to drive a thousand dollars per customer per year, and your business ARPU is actually running at $50 a year, you clearly have experiential or other product problems that need to be addressed immediately.

Some apps are primarily designed not to drive revenue, but rather to improve overall customer experience. An example would be a companion app for a hotel. Such apps often have relatively low revenue goals – perhaps to simply break even. In this case, you should compare your ARPU to your acquisition cost in order to see if your app is meeting this admittedly modest goal.

But ARPU is primarily used to compare vendors and campaigns to one another to determine the quality of users that are being attracted. By examining ARPU from different vendor, for example, you can assess if certain partners are attracting higher or lower quality users/customers.

You can find ARPU data in a Apsalar Traffic Report. All data is dummy data in this screenshot.

Now let’s look at an example of how ARPU can help you make better media allocation decisions.

Suppose you worked with just three media vendors. All were using the same creative in the same campaign. Over the course of 90 days, you found the following ARPUs:

Vendor A is delivering the highest ARPU, at 1.3% above Vendor B and 155% more than Vendor C. Clearly, then, Vendor A and Vendor B are attracting a higher quality user than Vendor C. That’s important to know because even if Vendor A offers a bit lower cost per install (CPI) than Vendors A or B, it may not make up for the difference in revenue per user. If your cost per install for Vendor A were $5, then the CPI for Vendor C would have to be less than $1.95 for it to be as cost effective as Vendor A. See below:

$544.63  =  $213.65     X = $1.95
$6                    $X

ARPU is a critical measure to consider for budget allocation. If we assume, for example, that Vendor C charges $4 per install, then putting more money into Vendor C is far less profitable than putting it into Vendors A or B. That’s because the ARPU from Vendor C is far lower. But without ARPU, you might rely on CPI to make your allocation decisions. Many companies do, and end up pouring more dollars into channels and vendors that are actually LESS EFFICIENT at driving revenue. 

In the analysis above we focused on differences between vendors ARPU. But the same method of analysis can also be used to compare campaigns and creative executions.

Using ARPPU to Analyze Your Business

Using ARPPU is most useful for app businesses with revenue coming from a small fraction of total users. For example, a freemium game. ARPPU is a useful measure with which to assess your app monetization process and buyer flow. Because only a small fraction of users are payers, it will be far easier for you to see the effects of a new monetization process on existing buyers.

Here’s what we mean. A 10% improvement in average revenue per payer driven by a better monetization process on a business with 1,000,000 installs but only 30,000 payers would be easy to spot in a test. Half your buyers go through the test process, the other half the control, and we would see a 10% difference. But if we used ARPU, we would be dividing the revenue difference across 500,000 installs, so effects would seem negligible.  See below:

In this example, a 2.5 cent change in ARPU doesn’t look like much. 2.5 cents. But based upon ARPPU the difference is almost a dollar!

Net, ARPPU is useful in certain circumstances on businesses with far more users than payers.

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