The easiest way to get these answers is to use a tool that combines both product and marketing analytics. Look no further than MyTracker – it can analyze financial metrics at any stage of the product cycle.
This article explains how MyTracker can help you review your project's key financial metrics and how to interpret, compare and combine them to get the full picture of your product's performance.
Revenue is the money your app generates from its users.
MyTracker calculates revenue based on in-app payments, subscriptions, ad placement, and custom revenue streams.
In-app payments are payments made by users in your app to buy things like game currency, skins or items via the App Store or Google Play.
Subscriptions are recurring payments to gain access to in-app content and perks, such as premium features or additional content. MyTracker automatically registers activation and renewal of subscriptions through the App Store or Google Play.
Ad monetization is the ad revenue you get from monetizing your app’s traffic. Revenue statistics are received from your advertising partner and can be integrated with MyTracker.
Custom revenue is any revenue that can be fed into MyTracker but doesn’t fall under in-app payments, subscriptions, or ads. For example, it can be an offline payment or an in-app payment received via a billing system other than the App Store or Google Play.
In-app payments and subscriptions coming from the App Store or Google Play can be collected using the MyTracker SDK.
Ad revenue can be tracked after setting up ad mediator integration in MyTracker.
For custom revenue, use the S2S API.
To check your project’s financials, you can use the Report builder to generate a report based on the financial metrics of your choosing. You can add filters and dimensions to really drill down.
Go to Reports → Builder.
Once inside the Report builder, you can find Revenue under Financial metrics. To add a metric, follow Report builder → Select from list → Devices → Financial metrics → Revenue.
Revenue analytics in MyTracker is available for devices and for users.
The Revenue metric alone is rarely enough to answer all your questions or uncover causes of anomalies, which is why it’s a good idea to enrich reports with additional parameters. For example, you can view revenue fluctuations by date – just add the Date dimension:
Getting a visual representation of your reports is a cinch in the Report builder: click the bar chart icon next to Revenue.
This is what you’ll see:
This graph clearly shows that each day the app is generating less revenue. The decline could be a consequence of many factors – to get to the root of it, return to the Report builder and add the Revenue type dimension:
To visualize a report with multiple dimensions, change its settings. Start by clicking Settings in the Report builder.
In the window that appears, set Results grouping to Revenue type, re-do the report, and view the revenue chart again.
Now we can see that the decline in revenue correlates with dwindling in-app payments. This may be due to a decreased number of paying users (DPU) or purchases (transactions).
Let’s look at the first hypothesis – fewer daily paying users – and generate a new report based on the DPU metric.
DPU/WPU/MPU represent the average number of paying users per day/week/month.
MyTracker calculates daily numbers of users or devices that make at least one payment, which lets you know how many paying customers you have and how that number changes over time.
You can view the app's DPU/WPU/MPU in the Report builder by selecting the respective metric in Financial metrics.
Let's build a report for the same period, but this time with the DPU and Revenue metrics.
The report shows that the drop in revenue is caused by a decrease in the number of paying users (DPU).
Let's take this further and look for the reason why DPU went down. Enrich the report with the DAU metric and visualize it the same way you did for the Revenue metric, this time with DPU. In the graph window, select DAU in Compare with... to check if active user numbers have anything to do with the drop in DPU and revenue.
We can see that the declining DPU was clearly caused by a sharp decrease in the app’s daily active users.
The First-time payers metric shows you the number of users who made their first in-app purchase during the specified period. This metric shows how many users have converted from non-paying to paying, thereby demonstrating the effectiveness of the marketing efforts and the inherent appeal of the product.
To find out the number of first-time payers, you need Financial metrics in the Report builder.
Let's apply the Month dimension and the New users and First-time payers LT metrics for May and June. This way we can see the number of new users for each of the months and how many of them ended up making at least one purchase, thus converting to paying.
The report shows that May saw more new users than June. However, those acquired in June were more likely to pay. At this point, you can analyze user acquisition channels that were in effect in June to determine the sources of the quality traffic.
ARPU is the average revenue an active user generates for your app within a specific timeframe. It helps you understand how effectively you monetize your active audience.
You can calculate your ARPU under Financial metrics in the Report builder.
For example, the report above shows that ARPU dropped quite a bit in March. Perhaps this was driven by user response to price changes or a drop in overall user activity in the app.
Let’s compare these values with another important metric – ARPPU.
To learn how to increase ARPU through personalization, read our case study with Hustle Castle:
ARPU means the average revenue per active user, while ARPPU refers to the average revenue per paying user.
ARPPU is instrumental in analyzing your paying customer segment and tracking its profitability over time.
The two metrics are typically analyzed together. The ARPPU to ARPU ratio shows how paying users relate to the price changes in the app and quality of paid content. For example, a plunge in prices can lead to a decrease in ARPPU, but an increase in ARPU. This is because some of the users who were previously dissatisfied with the cost of your services may start buying.
Let's add ARPPU to the previously created ARPU report and see what happens.
Here, we can see that ARPPU decreased significantly following the decrease in ARPU. Perhaps the changes in paid content made in March were perceived negatively by the users, causing a sharp decrease in revenue.
The campaign cost is the cost of the app promotion denominated in any selected currency.
The campaign cost data can be provided by your ad partner via an API after the partner integration with MyTracker, via tracking link parameters, or calculated automatically based on manually added tariffs.
The choice of method depends on the capabilities of the advertising partner and its integration with myTracker.
You can obtain your campaign cost data under Financial metrics in the Report builder.
When the campaign cost data is provided to MyTracker, ROI becomes available in the Report builder.
ROI is the return you get from investing in your ad campaign. To calculate ROI, take the total revenue that resulted from your ad over a period of time and divide it by your total costs over the same period. ROI higher than 100% means that the ad is working.
By creating a report for the campaign cost, revenue and ROI broken down by the Campaign dimension in the Report builder, you can see which ad campaigns are profitable and which ones only generate expenses as costs exceed revenue.
For example, the report above shows two ad campaigns – C1 and C2.
C1 has $36K in costs on user acquisition along with user revenue of $27K. The ROI for this campaign is 74.90%, which means that the ad has not yet paid off.
C2, in turn, has $19K in costs on user acquisition, and user revenue of $22K. The ROI for this campaign is 113%, which means that the ad has already shown profitability of 13%.
It is worth noting that ROI is not the type of metric you measure on the spot, as quite a long period of time can elapse between the start of the campaign and the first payment, so choosing the right moment is vital.
To reliably estimate ROI you need to look at historical data from other campaigns and figure out the average payback period for user acquisition.
For example, by analyzing historical data, you can find out that the cost of attracting a new user pays off in an average of three months of using the app, and also determine how much such users pay on average during the first eight days.
This will help you evaluate your new ad campaigns, because you will have realistic expectations as to how much an average user would normally pay in the first eight days, and what ROI would be considered acceptable on the eighth day.
Lifetime value (LTV) is the total cumulative revenue per user since they installed your app. This metric is similar to revenue, only time-capped.
It shows revenue from users attracted during the specified period, helping identify the source of customers with higher LTV for further scale-up. At the same time, a decreasing LTV is a red flag that calls for rooting out the culprit, fast.
In addition to standard reports, MyTracker offers predictive LTV analytics based on machine learning models. You can use it to find out how today’s decision will affect a product’s revenue in a month, six months, or two years. If you’d like to learn more about predictive analytics and how to use it, please check out our blog.
To use predictive analytics for your project, go to Report builder → Select from list → Devices → LTV Prediction.
For example, the report above shows that the users attracted via Partner 1 will only start bringing in revenue after six months. Also, the LTV prediction makes it clear that the cost of user acquisition via Partner 2 won’t pay off even after two years. So it’s worth taking a closer look and adjusting the campaigns involving Partner 2.
Previously, we analyzed financial metrics using the Report builder. If you don't need in-depth analytics, you can use the Dashboard to analyze revenue in MyTracker or use pre-built Templates in the Report builder.
The Dashboard is the easiest and fastest tool for quickly assessing financial performance. It presents easy-to-use reports with key information about your project, with many filters, graphs and the ability to add more metrics and dimensions from the Report builder.
To find it, go to Reports → Dashboard.
Monetization, which is part of the Dashboard, will help you monitor your project’s financials such as revenue, ARPU and ARPPU. Easy-to-read graphs can be used to quickly assess the effectiveness of different monetization strategies, analyze your paying audience and see if there is a mismatch between the marketing costs and revenue.
Templates are a tool to simplify report generation in the Report builder. They come with key financial metrics and allow for customization.
To use templates, go to Reports → Templates → Default templates.
You can use the Financial statement template to view the key financials of your project.
In this article, we gained insights into a product’s financial metrics in MyTracker and learned:
All of these tools are available in MyTracker for free. You need to register, set up a working environment, and install the SDK – full details are available in our documentation.
