We understand that managing and scaling user acquisition (UA) is the number one pain point for free-to-play (F2P) developers. And, in the current F2P climate, where a small number of juggernaut publishers dominate the app store charts, scaling a game beyond a few thousand installs can seem daunting.

Until recently, it was common for organic installs to outperform paid installs as the level of targeting was poor. But, as paid UA has improved dramatically in the last few years, we needed to find out: Are paid installs worth the investment?

Average revenue per paying user (ARPPU)

To compare the performance of organic and paid-for players, deltaDNA, in partnership with Appsflyer and Adjust, tracked the source of installs across thousands of games. For simplicity, they zeroed in on players from the United States who installed a game in the first seven months of 2016. Here’s what they found:

On the Amazon Appstore, users acquired through paid spend about $0.94 in the first 30 days of play, compared to only $0.55 for users acquired organically.

It is clear that the average game in the study uses UA effectively to bring in good quality players. This does not guarantee a positive ROI, of course. Cost-per-install (CPI) on mobile is often more than $2, so even though paid users have an ARPU 71 percent higher than organic users, a typical game still generates just half of its CPI in the first month of play.

Retention

What about retention? How do paid users compare to their organic counterparts?

It is clear that users acquired through paid are more likely to engage with your app than those acquired organically, and this likelihood increases over time.

Does it scale?

This is where data gets really interesting. The ration of paid-to-organic ARPPU for games with less than 100k paid installs was 4x. But as installs grew to over 100k installs, this ratio decreased to only 2x. In other words, it may be easy to identify small pockets of high-quality players, but these will be limited.

Marketing your app

Ready to start marketing your app or game? Check out our guide, 8 Tips for Marketing Your App: