Many app developers are looking to project their app revenue as they are starting out. This is obviously an important question as publishers needs to justify the development effort in their mobile apps. The answer is dependent on many parameters and quite complex to answer. However, we identified the key drivers and created the following calculator for you. Below the calculator you can find explanation of all the fields.
Mobile App Revenue Calculator
Calculator Explanation and Fields
The calculator has 4 parts:
- Retention Inputs
- Monetization Inputs
- Traffic Inputs
- Output / Results
Retention Inputs
Here you will need to input your D1, D7, D14 and D30 retention figures. If you are unclear about how to do this we highly recommend checking these guides for getting your retention in Flurry and GA. Even if you are using another analytics platform it will give you a sense of what you are looking for. In short d1 retention is how many users played your game 1 day after the first day they played. If you had 1,000 users that downloaded your game and played it in one specific day and the next day 350 of them came back to play again your D1 retention is 35%. One popular benchmark in the mobile games industry is 40%,20%,10% for D1, D7 and D30 retention – this is considered good retention and not all games get there.
Monetization Inputs
In order to calculate your app revenue, we need 2 types of monetization inputs: IAP and Ads. For In-App Purchase (IAP), the two input fields are:
- Conversion rate to payers
- Average Revenue Per Paying User (ARPPU)
The ARPPU is impacted greatly based on what type of app you have. Some apps and games simply sell remove ads for $1 and then the ARPPU will be $1. Strategy game apps on the other hand allow the user to build armies and castles by buying virtual currency and create a competitive state that can lead users to spend hundreds of dollars in the app.
On the Ad side of things, you will need to enter the following fields:
- Opt-in ratio to rewarded video
- Number of rewarded videos you expect your user to see in a typical day
- Number of interstitials you expect users to watch in a typical day
- Number of banners per day
Note that most apps don’t have all 3 at the same time. If your app doesn’t have one of these ad types, simply put 0 (zero). The opt-in ratio to rewarded video is a tricky one if you haven’t started out yet. Consider these values:
- 10% if you are hiding it inside the virtual goods store
- 20% if you are prompting users in a specific situations as they run out of a resource
- 40-60% if you are going to measure and optimize on this parameter and have multiple prompts on a daily basis
If your app have interstitial videos as opposed to rewarded videos, just treat them as regular interstitials.
Traffic Inputs
Another critical set of data for calculating the app revenue is how many users you will have. You will need to enter the expected number of downloads per day and the traffic mix between Tier 1 (US, UK, CA, AU, DE, FR, NO, FI, SE) and Tier 2 countries. If you are unsure about the values for these fields or other fields in the calculator you can also check out our game benchmarks post.
Outputs/ Results
Here you will find the estimated daily app revenue alongside other results:
- User life days – this is how many days the average user will play in your game over his entire life
- DAU – how many users open your app on a daily basis
- Tier1 ARPDAU – the daily revenue per active users for tier 1 countries
- Tier2 ARPDAU – the daily app revenue per user in tier 2 countries
- The ratio of ad revenue out of the total
We also wrote up a full post on the comparison between ad networks here or download the full comparison spreadsheet below for free.
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