Introducing Monetization Metrics for the Analytics Dashboard

Hi developers,

We are thrilled to let you know that a new Monetization section is now available as part of the standard analytics dashboard! Accordingly, we are deprecating some of the related charts in Developer Stats.

With this update, we’re also lowering the required DAUs from 500 to 300.


What’s New

Monetization is an important part in making your game sustainable. It includes revenue earned from your in-game shop sales (developer products), paid access (if applicable), game passes, affiliate fees for selling others’ items, etc. To do it well, you have to understand and fine-tune the purchase flows, up-sell mechanics, as well as progression balancing, item valuation, in-game economy, and the overall design.

To get better actionable insights, you’ll need full visibility of the monetization performance for your experience. As a result, we have added a new Monetization subpage under the Analytics section of the Standard Dashboard.


Available KPIs

Below are the KPIs (key performance indicators) that are available and how to use them:

Daily Revenue

Definition: Total amount of Robux earned by the experience in a day; If your experience has more than one place, the system will count revenues from all of them.

How to use: Knowing how much your players are willing to spend, among other key metrics, will allow you to understand the health of the monetization in your game and to adjust your monetization strategy more effectively.

Revenue Source

Definition: The daily revenue breakdown by source, including game shop items, game passes, private servers, paid access, as well as affiliate fees for avatar items and for game passes.

How to use: This KPI helps you understand your important revenue driver so that you can strategically choose the area to optimize for.

Paying Users

Definition: Total number of unique users who purchased experience-related items in a day.

How to use: This KPI helps measure the effectiveness of your monetization design. Understanding what’s valuable in your game to players can help you figure out what to sell, how to set prices for players with varying wallet sizes, and how to design progression and economy to encourage that first purchase. This can then create longer-term paying users.

ARPDAU (Average Revenue per Daily Active User)

Definition: Avg. revenue per user among all DAUs, measured by Robux, which equals Daily revenue / DAU

How to use: ARPDAU is one of the key metrics to track for monetization. You can understand the value of each player in your game and use it to estimate the change in revenue you’ll see as your DAU and MAU change over time.

ARPPU (Average Revenue per Paying User)

Definition: Avg. revenue per paying user, which equals Daily revenue / Paying users

How to use: ARPPU focuses on the players who are willing to pay for your game and is most useful when considered alongside your conversion rate.
Players who buy something in your game once are often more likely to buy again. A high ARPPU typically means that your paying players are finding high, repeat value in your game and is also indicative of high player engagement.

Conversion Rate

Definition: Percentage of DAUs are paying users, which equals paying users / DAU

How to use: The conversion rate reflects how well you are able to motivate players to spend money in your game. If you have a high conversion rate, for example, and a low ARPPU, that indicates that you are good at getting players to buy at least one item in your game, but that there is little beyond that initial purchase that inspires further spending. Understanding what is inspiring that first-time purchase and examining its value could help you determine what content you need to create to inspire more purchases.

A few things to notice:

  • All revenue shown in the chart is net revenue, e.g. what you are expected to earn and after deducting fees from Roblox and the original creators if applicable.
  • Refunds are not tracked in the KPIs so what you actually earn may be different. The KPIs are meant for analyzing your game’s performance, not for financial reporting. You can go to My Transactions to get the final numbers for your income.
  • The monetization KPIs have a two day latency due to system limitations.
  • The KPIs are for the whole experience instead of an individual place to give you a holistic view.

Breakdowns

Like other KPIs on the standard dashboard, each monetization KPI has a benchmark and can be broken down by Age Group, Country, Language, Platform, and OS.

The breakdown can give you insights about which segment of your users monetize better. For example, you may find that most of your users fall into the 13-17 age group, but the 18+ group has the highest conversion rate, so you may want to optimize your content towards older users to increase your revenue.


Deprecating Historical Revenue Charts on Dev Stats

To minimize the confusion among similar stats, we are deprecating the “Robux Revenue” and “Revenue per Visit” under Historical Data, and the “Data Table” under the “Developer Product Sales” section on the Developer Stats page. All of the data can be found in the new monetization dashboard. Note the top-selling developer products pie chart will still be available. We plan to build a replacement for this on the new dashboard in the future.

We hope you enjoy this update and take advantage of the KPIs! To get started, go to the Creator Dashboard, select the game you’re interested in, and then click “Monetization” under the “Analytics” section in the left navigation. Please don’t hesitate to give us any feedback you have!


Cheers for better insights,

The Roblox Creator Services Team


FAQ

Why do the Engagement and Retention KPIs require a higher threshold (300 DAUs) than the monetization ones (10 DAUs)?

  • The Engagement and Retention KPIs are using a different data pipeline than the monetization ones. The former pipeline has more constraints so we have to set a relatively higher threshold. We’ll try to open up to more experiences as the system scales.

What can I do to understand monetization if my game has fewer than 10 DAUs?

  • Generally speaking, you should not focus on monetization if your game has not gained much traction. Instead, we recommend first focusing on KPIs like average playtime or D1 retention by iterating on your game design, onboarding experience, etc.
  • You can still go to My Transactions to get a sense of how players make purchases.

What’s the plan for the metrics on the Developer Stats page?

  • We plan to gradually replace the functionality on Developer Stats and eventually retire the whole page.
  • We recommend relying on the new analytics dashboard to analyze your game’s performance going forward.
139 Likes

This topic was automatically opened after 11 minutes.

Monetization metrics are crucial in part of determining a game’s success. Seeing how effective monetization is in a project can imply other metrics, such as how invested players are in a game.

There’s a lot to break down just with monetization alone, so by providing this data to the developers, the developers have more power to effectively market and grow their games.

My only wish is that at some point we can make custom queries, like in the old PlayFab beta, so that we can track in-game currency and other forms of in-game economy.

Overall great change and I’m glad to see it. No complaints here!

25 Likes

RIP Developer stats table :smiling_face_with_tear: you will always be in my heart. :heart:

13 Likes

I’m not seeing this available in my creator dashboard?

And when I go to Developer Stats, it’s removed.

5 Likes

Hi @MasterXertz If you are not the owner of the experience. You need to talk to the owner of the experience and ask him to turn on the view permission for you.

This post has detailed instruction on how to set up group permission.

5 Likes

This change has disrupted my workflow:

  1. I regularly check the Developer Stats tables at each granularity for my games to see the numbers at a quick glance

  2. I use the daily revenue stats on a weekly basis to build up a report of weekly revenue for each of my games

The monetization charts are not a sufficient alternative to the old Developer Stats tables because I have to interact with them carefully to read off datapoints. It is also much more difficult to build the weekly reports which are important to my workflow.

Generating monthly revenue stats using the existing data export tools is also not a sufficient alternative because I have to wait for the entire month to complete and it requires non-trivial processing to assemble daily revenue totals.

It also seems that this new monetization page is gated behind a group permission because the entire Analytics sub-menu does not appear on the left sidebar in the Creator Dashboard, despite the game in question having well over the DAU requirements.

See reply above about group permissions.

To get this data that I had access to before this sudden change, I now have to hit the api endpoint which is an insufficient and fiddly workaround.

Please offer revenue stats in a table-format at the original Hourly, Daily, and Monthly granularities as the original Developer Stats table did.

31 Likes

Hi @sircfenner Thanks for the feedback.
All of the data inside our report is downloadable.
All the charts top right has a export button that can export the data you see as csv. And the csv can include all the revenue data at daily level with breakdown. This csv should help you simplify your workflow as it is already a report so you do not have to manually create a report by yourself.
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Unfortunately we do not have hourly data anymore as we evaluate we feel hourly data is not very useful to give developers the performance of the game since it varies a lot. We definitely will revisit if many developers complain about the granularities.

2 Likes

Thanks. When I get access to those new pages I’ll take a look and see if it is a sufficient replacement for my daily/weekly use cases. Having to download and open a file is an extra unexpected step in my workflow so this is still not ideal at all.

Please consider this as a complaint about that. I would really have appreciated being consulted on this because it does disrupt my workflow.

I pay very close attention to hourly revenue, for example after releasing updates and similar contexts such as countdowns and live events. I find that it is a helpful metric and it’s a shame that now I can’t access it the same way that I did just yesterday.

23 Likes

I heavily disagree. Hourly data is one of the most important factors on determining changes’ impact as well as localization support for monetization.

All three available data metrics are important, hourly, daily and monthly.

Giving up on hourly because of its instability is a mistake. The fact it’s unstable is actually useful. Usually instability means the game is doing worse at certain timezones, which is a sign something needs to be changed. This is something I’ve found useful many times during development in Roblox, where hourly data allowed quick evaluations of the impact of changes in monetization, and helped determine with great efficiency what languages to translate for the games and ways to support different countries and audiences.

A removal of hourly data would be bad for our workflow, and worse than that, greatly impactful in how we evaluate monetization across our games.

28 Likes

Where did the pie chart that shows you what % of revenue a given gamepass / devproduct makes up go? It doesn’t appear anywhere with this update.

If it was removed, it should be re-added! It was a useful metric to see.

1 Like

Thanks for the suggestion. Another reason is that the previous flow that reports revenue data does not guarantee the accuracy. Therefore we have this new flow that can provide a more accurate data.
It is true that even the value may not be accurate, it can still give you the insight on how things are going at hourly level. I will definitely bring this feedback back to our team and see what we can do.

5 Likes

Hi @Noble_Draconian The revenue percentage is still in the old developer stats page. If you choose daily/monthly chart the pie chart should show up. Since we do not have a similar chart in our new metrics dashboard we did not remove that in the old page.

1 Like

Are there plans to migrate this to the newer pages with improved functionality & filtering?

We are working with our team to come up a better way of showing the breakdown by developer product and game pass type.

3 Likes

I feel that there should be no ‘required DAU’ for these stats, I make Robux off my experience and I don’t come anywhere close to this DAU requirement! Personally, I think it should be up to the developer on whether they want to view their monetisation stats or not, not the Roblox platform.

So you guys are removing the older charts? If so, this is incredibly annoying since as a developer with under 10 DAU on most of my experiences, I am losing access to all of this data that I previously did have access to…

4 Likes

Hourly data may not very useful for Roblox employees and large experiences, but as a small developer, it is very useful. As our avatar editor experience is 100% driven by clothing and UGC purchases, we rely on the ability to see how changes are reflecting our sales and react if necessary. If we are underperforming our goals, we may opt for additional ads, change product placement, or rollback updates. While launching a new game these things are critical.

Our admin staff rely on knowing what time of day people are spending money so we can choose the best times to join our experiences and engage with our players. Our team continually monitors the stats all day and removing this feature sounds like a decision clearly made without consulting the people who actually use it.

17 Likes

Thanks for the feedback. All these suggestions are valuable.
There is one way to check up to date purchase by looking at the my transaction page.
Roblox should help give some idea for the most up to date transactions happening. The game owner should be able to see all the transactions for the game there. Do you think it can partially help solve the problem? Meanwhile, we will discuss within our team about what we do next.

4 Likes

Hi @Abcreator There is some legal and privacy concern from Roblox side to show the monetization data when there is too few players playing the game so we set up the 10 DAU threshold.
Roblox should still give you the ability to see all the transactions happened to your experiences. If you have a low DAU, we believe there should be limited number of transactions and my transaction page should be able to list them all for a given time period.
If you have trouble viewing all the transactions you have let us know. Thanks!

4 Likes

Unfortunately, this will not help as the My Transactions page does not work with group games. Furthermore, to complicate the matter, clothing and UGC sales/commissions do not show up at all in the group Sales page. They are literally phantom transactions that just add to the Pending Robux and we have no way to see them that I know of, besides the exporting of monthly data spreadsheets. Maybe I am missing something here?

4 Likes