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.