Ad revenue in a mobile app comes down to how many ads you show and what each thousand of them earns. The calculation is short, but each input is worth checking against your own data.
You get a day, a month and a year, plus what each daily user is worth to you.
How to use the Mobile App Ad Revenue Calculator#
- Enter your users. Use daily active users, not total downloads.
- Describe the ads. Add sessions per user, ads per session and the fill rate.
- Add your eCPM. Use the figure from your ad network report.
The formula#
With 5,000 daily users, 3 sessions each, 2 ads per session and a 90 percent fill rate, you show 27,000 ads a day. At an eCPM of 2 dollars, that earns 54 dollars a day, about 1,620 dollars over 30 days.
What drives eCPM#
Ad format has the biggest effect. Rewarded video and interstitial ads usually earn more per impression than small banners. Audience country matters too, along with the time of year and how well the ad network fills requests. An eCPM that looks good in one country can be far lower in another.
Balancing ads and users#
More ads per session earn more in the short term, but too many drive users away, and a user who leaves earns nothing. Test changes gradually, watch retention as well as revenue, and keep your ad placements within the network’s policies.
A worked example#
An app has 20,000 daily active users, each opening it 3 times a day and seeing 4 ads per session. The ad network fills 80 percent of requests, and the eCPM is $2.5. Impressions per day are 20,000 × 3 × 4 × 0.8 = 192,000. Revenue is 192,000 ÷ 1,000 × 2.5 = $480.00 a day, about $14,400.00 a month. That works out at $0.0240 per user per day, the figure called ARPDAU.
Why the inputs are so uncertain#
eCPM, the revenue per thousand impressions, depends on the country of the user, the ad format, the season and the quality of the audience. Rewarded video ads usually earn far more per impression than banners, and users in North America and Western Europe are worth many times those in other regions. Fill rate is the share of ad requests that a network actually serves. It can be 95 percent in a big market and under 50 percent elsewhere. Use your own network’s reports to replace these numbers.
Ads versus the users you keep#
More ads per session raise revenue in the short run, but they push people to uninstall. Many developers test frequency caps, with fewer ads at the start of a user’s first sessions and more later. Track retention on day 1, day 7 and day 30 as well as revenue. A small drop in retention can cancel a big rise in ad income, since every lost user stops generating revenue for as long as they would have stayed. For other platforms, see the website ad revenue calculator.
Levers that raise ARPDAU#
- Better ad placement at natural pauses, such as between levels, increases impressions without annoying users.
- Rewarded video, where users choose to watch an ad for a bonus, earns more per impression and tends to be popular with players.
- Mediation, which lets several ad networks compete for each impression, raises eCPM and fill rate.
- Growing the share of users in high-eCPM countries increases revenue for the same number of downloads.
- Keeping users longer, through better onboarding and regular updates, multiplies every other gain.
Frequently asked questions#
Effective cost per mille. It’s the revenue you earn for every 1,000 ad impressions.
The share of ad requests that actually return an ad.
Average revenue per daily active user. It’s the day’s revenue divided by daily users.
No. It’s an estimate. Your real revenue depends on the ad network and your users.
It depends on your eCPM and engagement. At 4 impressions per user per day and an eCPM of $2, each daily user earns about $0.008 a day, or $0.24 a month. To make $1,000 a month you would need around 4,000 daily users with those numbers, and many more in a low-eCPM market. Enter your own figures to see the result.
In large markets, networks often fill most requests, but a good mediation setup is needed to keep fill high in smaller ones. Fill rates below 80 percent usually mean there is room to add networks or lower floors. The best figure to use is the one in your ad dashboard for your own app and countries.