TL;DR: ARPDAU is the average revenue generated per daily active user, the standard daily monetization pulse borrowed from mobile gaming and increasingly used in iGaming for day-level monitoring of promotions, releases and live events.
What it means
ARPDAU answers a narrower question than ARPU: not "how much is a player worth this month" but "how much did the average active player generate *today*". That granularity is why it came out of the mobile/social gaming world, where daily content updates and offers need same-day feedback, and why iGaming teams adopted it for the moments where days matter: a new slot release, a bonus campaign, a major sports weekend.
Because the denominator is *daily* actives, ARPDAU is always far smaller than monthly ARPU — and the two are not interchangeable. A player who deposits once a month appears in every day's DAU they log in, but only contributes revenue on some of them.
Formula / How it's measured
ARPDAU = Revenue in a day / DAU (unique active users that day).
In iGaming the revenue input should be NGR for the day; in mobile gaming it is typically IAP + ad revenue. Example: a casino brand with $46,000 NGR on a Saturday and 9,200 unique active players that day has an ARPDAU of $5.00.
Teams usually read it as a 7-day rolling average, because single-day ARPDAU is noisy: one VIP session or one jackpot payout can move it violently.
Why it matters for operators
- Campaign feedback in hours, not weeks: if a free-spins campaign lifts DAU but ARPDAU collapses, the promotion bought activity, not revenue.
- Live-ops cadence: sportsbooks compare event-day ARPDAU (e.g., a derby or a UFC night) against baseline days to value content calendars.
- Mixed portfolios: brands running both casual/social titles and real-money products use ARPDAU as the one metric comparable across both.
Common mistakes
- Comparing ARPDAU against monthly ARPU as if they were the same scale (a $5 ARPDAU is not "worse" than a $60 ARPU)
- Computing it on GGR instead of NGR, which overstates daily monetization exactly when bonus cost is highest — during promotions
- Reading single days instead of rolling averages, and reallocating budget based on VIP-driven noise
See also
- ARPU — Average Revenue Per User
- LTV — Lifetime Value
- NGR — Net Gaming Revenue