Average revenue per user (ARPU)
ARPU is the average amount of revenue your product earns from each active user over a given period. It looks across your entire audience — payers and non-payers alike — and tells you, in a single figure, how efficiently you turn users into money. It is the broadest monetization metric a product has, which is exactly why teams quote it first.
How it is calculated
The definition is deliberately simple:
ARPU = total revenue in a period / number of active users in that period
The period matters enormously. ARPDAU (average revenue per daily active user) divides revenue by daily actives and is the de-facto pulse metric for live games. Monthly ARPU divides a month of revenue by monthly active users. Because the denominator includes everyone, ARPU folds two distinct forces into one number: the share of users who pay, and how much those payers spend. When ARPU moves, you have to look underneath to know which lever shifted.
Why it matters
ARPU is the bridge between audience size and revenue. Multiply it by your active-user base and you get top-line revenue; pair it with retention and you can model how much a cohort is worth over time, which feeds directly into lifetime value. It also sets a ceiling on acquisition: if your blended ARPU and retention cannot beat your cost to acquire a user, paid growth loses money no matter how cheap the clicks are.
In games and apps
ARPU behaves very differently across business models. A free-to-play game may show a low ARPU because most players never spend, while a small group of whales carries the revenue — which is why teams watch ARPPU alongside it to separate “how many pay” from “how much payers spend.” Apps with subscriptions tend to have steadier, higher ARPU. Either way, segmenting ARPU by country, channel and platform reveals where monetization is genuinely strong versus where a single cohort flatters the average.
In Keentics
Keentics computes ARPU and ARPDAU directly from your raw revenue and activity events, so the figure matches your real ledger rather than a sampled estimate. You can slice it by acquisition channel, segment, country or product version, and line it up against retention to see which audiences actually compound. Explore the game analytics feature for revenue dashboards, or the mobile app analytics view for subscription products.
Related: Active users · ARPPU · Attribution · CAC