DEU, daily engaged users, narrows the population to people who actually interacted with the placement being measured. It exists because measuring an offerwall against total DAU answers a different question from the one publishers usually mean to ask.

How to calculate DEU

DEU = Unique users who engaged with the placement on a given day

DEU = Unique users who engaged with the placement on a given day

DEU = Unique users who engaged with the placement on a given day

Engagement here means opening the wall and interacting with it, not merely being exposed to an entry point. The precise definition varies between platforms, which is why DEU travels badly between vendors and works best as an internal series.

A quick example

An app records 120,000 DAU. Of those, 9,000 open the offerwall and browse it:

DEU = 9,000
Wall reach = 9,000 / 120,000 = 7.5% of DAU

DEU = 9,000
Wall reach = 9,000 / 120,000 = 7.5% of DAU

DEU = 9,000
Wall reach = 9,000 / 120,000 = 7.5% of DAU

If the wall earned $4,500 that day, revenue per DAU is $0.0375 while revenue per engaged user is $0.50. Both are true, and they describe entirely different things.

What counts as a good DEU?

• The absolute number is meaningless on its own. It scales with the size of the app, so only the ratio to DAU is comparable.

• Wall reach is the useful figure. What share of daily users find and open the placement at all?

• Entry-point placement dominates it. A wall buried three menus deep produces a low DEU regardless of how good the offers are.

• Watch it after any UI change. DEU is the fastest indicator that a navigation change helped or hurt discovery.

DEU vs. DAU

Measuring offerwall revenue against DAU tells you how much of your whole audience uses the wall, which is a discovery and placement question. Measuring it against DEU tells you how well the wall monetizes the people who already use it, which is an offer-quality question. Conflating them hides which of the two problems you actually have, and they have completely different fixes.

DEU and placement design

DEU is largely a function of where the entry point lives and how it is labelled. Moving a wall from a submenu to the main currency screen routinely multiplies engaged users without any change to the offers themselves, and the reverse is equally true. Because it responds to placement rather than to demand, DEU is the fastest metric for reading the impact of a UI change, usually within a day, well before revenue effects are distinguishable from noise.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Comparing DEU across apps. Definitions and entry-point design differ too much for the comparison to mean anything.

• Counting impressions instead of users. One user opening the wall five times is one engaged user.

• Treating a DEU rise as a revenue rise. More people browsing without converting moves DEU and not much else.

• Ignoring it entirely. Without DEU there is no way to tell a discovery problem from a monetization one.