ARPDEU, average revenue per daily engaged user, is the offerwall counterpart to ARPDAU, with the denominator narrowed from everyone active in the app to those who engaged with the placement. That narrowing is what makes it useful for judging the placement itself.
How to calculate ARPDEU
A worked example
A wall earns $4,500 from 9,000 engaged users, in an app with 120,000 daily active users:
Both describe the same day. ARPDAU says what the wall contributes per app user; ARPDEU says what it earns from each person who used it. Improving discovery moves the first; improving offers moves the second.
What counts as a good ARPDEU?
Geography dominates. An engaged user in a high-spending market can be worth many times one elsewhere, and no benchmark survives that spread.
Offer mix matters next. Walls carrying purchase and subscription offers post higher ARPDEU than survey-only walls.
Your own trend is the benchmark. Compare against your previous weeks, not an industry figure from a different audience.
Stability is the point. Unlike ARPDAU, it does not move when overall app traffic shifts, which makes it a clean test surface.
ARPDEU vs. ARPDAU
ARPDAU blends monetization with app-wide engagement, so it moves whenever traffic moves, for reasons that have nothing to do with the wall. ARPDEU holds the denominator to people who engaged, so a change in it means something about the placement actually changed. That is why it is the right metric for A/B testing wall layout or offer ordering.
How to improve it
Improve offer relevance. Surfacing offers that match the user's market and platform lifts completion more than adding volume.
Raise the ceiling of the offer mix. One high-value purchase offer can outweigh hundreds of small completions.
Reduce failed and reversed completions. Revenue lost to a reversal comes straight off this number.
Order the wall by EPC. Ranking by EPC rather than headline payout raises realized revenue per user.
Common mistakes to avoid
Comparing it to ARPDAU as though they were the same metric. They differ by an order of magnitude by construction.
Reading it on low engagement days. A small DEU makes the average volatile and easy to misread.
Chasing it by suppressing engagement. Making the wall harder to open raises ARPDEU and lowers revenue.
Frequently asked questions
Q: How is ARPDEU different from ARPDAU?
Q: Why is ARPDEU better for A/B testing?
Q: What is a good ARPDEU?
Keep reading
Metric
DEU counts the users who actively engaged with a monetization surface on a given day, rather than everyone who opened the app. It is the denominator that makes offerwall revenue comparable across apps of very different sizes.
Metric
ARPDAU measures how much revenue an app generates, on average, from each active user in a single day. It's one of the most-watched monetization metrics in mobile gaming and apps because it blends how well you monetize with how engaged your users are into a single daily number.
Metric
ARPDUC is revenue divided by daily unique converters. It measures what a converting user is worth, stripping out everyone who browsed without completing anything.
Metric
eCPM (effective Cost Per Mille) is a publisher's estimated earnings per 1,000 impressions across any pricing model. It is the standard way to compare how much different ad units, networks, or placements actually earn.